Malcolm Bruce: I am very privileged to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi); the House will be glad that he left his
	loud tie and accompanying soundtrack behind. But he did manage to make a powerful and entertaining speech. I remind him, however, that he and I would be considerably disadvantaged in our task today had we not been elected to this House. Law-makers should be held accountable to law-obeyers.
	It is an honour to be asked to second the Loyal Address and a great surprise to be doing so. I realise I am the old guard following the young blood, but I hope that the kinder Members of the House might see a little wisdom tempering youthful exuberance. A great deal has changed in the 29 years since I entered the House, but some things do not change. I made my maiden speech in a Queen’s Speech debate on the health service. The Health Minister who replied was the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), who has proved himself a survivor in Government, even if he is now more rounded and more mellow—even if we are talking only about his shoes and his figure.
	I represent part of the north-east of Scotland, which is characterised by a dry, understated sense of humour. For the past 30 years, we have been entertained by a talented trio known as Scotland the What? and they invented a number of kooky characters, one of whom was the Member of Parliament for Aucherturra wi’ Clatt, which is a name that resonates across Gordon, if nowhere else; indeed, I think that you are looking at that hon. Member. Less salubrious was Councillor Swick, which means “swindle” in the local dialect. In one sketch, he plays a justice of the peace, and he instructs the procurator fiscal to bring in the first criminal. When he is told that the accused is innocent until proved guilty, he demands of the procurator fiscal, “Whose side are you on?” At the end of his presiding over the court, he concluded, “In my court, justice has not only to be done but has to be seen to be believed.”
	The constituency of Gordon has changed a great deal. For a start, it has experienced four boundary changes. Nevertheless, the voters of Gordon have done me the honour of electing me seven times. Currently, one third of the population lives in the northern part of the city of Aberdeen, which includes the airport— the fastest-growing airport in the UK. That airport is crucial to our dynamic economy. We have two renowned universities and food and agricultural research centres of world repute, while Rowett research institute has produced no fewer than three Nobel laureates, and of course there is the global energy industry. Like most people in Gordon, I did not support the oil tax changes in last year’s Budget, but I appreciate the engagement with the industry by all relevant Ministers and Departments, which led to further tax measures in this year’s Budget that have gone a long way towards restoring confidence.
	The other two thirds of the population of Gordon live in central Aberdeenshire—a productive farming and food producing region notable for prime beef promoted by ANM Group, Scotch Premier Meat, and innovative mail order pioneer Donald Russell. We also have quality ice cream makers Mackie, who also produce a range of crisps, and Rizza’s of Huntly, which is also the home of Dean’s, makers of melt-in-the-mouth shortbread and biscuits. [ Interruption. ] They did not pay me to say that, I promise. Many of those food producers, and our mixed livestock and arable farmers, will welcome the Bill to establish a groceries code adjudicator.
	People often ask me where Gordon is. The trouble is that the constituency derives its name not from a place but from the Gordon family. Lady Aberdeen, June Gordon, who died in 2009 at the age of 95, was well beloved as a great patron of the arts at Haddo house. At an event shortly after my re-election in 1997, she told me that she was delighted that I had been re-elected given my small majority in 1983. “I was so concerned that you might not get back”, she said, “that I nearly voted for you.” The Gordon family have also produced one Prime Minister, the fourth Earl of Aberdeen, who led a Liberal-Conservative Government and included Palmerston and Gladstone in his Cabinet.
	Of course, we are also famous for fine malt whisky. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] That is going down well at the back. One commentator described me as the Member for Gordon, the home of malt gin; and in fact it is the same Gordon family who were responsible for that most English of drinks—gin. We have some fine distilleries, including Glendronach, Ardmore and Glen Garioch, which won an award for the best Highland single malt this March—so go out and get it!
	Scotland’s First Minister has stated that he will not wear a kilt in Scotland until independence has been achieved. Of all the economic, historical, legal, cultural and social arguments for rejecting independence, surely the most overwhelming must be to protect the people of Scotland from the sight of Alex Salmond in a kilt.
	No Member on the Government Benches needs telling that this is a difficult time to be in government. We inherited an unsustainable level of public debt and a recession across developed economies. The coalition agreement took as its mantra “freedom, fairness and responsibility” and we must work harder on that.
	In the two years since the first Queen’s Speech of this Parliament, a great deal of heavy lifting has been carried out. When there is no money left, it is impossible not to make painful decisions to turn around a huge debt and lay the foundations of a more sustainable future. However, I believe that we have strived hard to be fair. Raising the tax threshold to £9,205 a year by the end of this Session and increasing pensions and most benefits with inflation at a time of no growth is, I believe, an extraordinary achievement.
	On the core agenda, the coalition has still much to do. This is not a time to be distracted by unproductive arguments between left and right or to deepen our divisions with the rest of Europe, whose problems profoundly affect us. There is more than enough that unites us.
	Our reform agenda, far from being some right-wing conspiracy to destroy our welfare system and public services, is aimed at ensuring that we can maintain in the long term the viable, fair and inclusive welfare system on which our civilised society depends. For that to happen, we need to secure growth in the private sector. I therefore welcome the Government’s commitment to banking and financial services reform. Apart from restoring confidence in retail banking and preventing casino banking from bringing down our financial system again, we must find more ways to stimulate investment and bank lending to get the economy moving. I also welcome the commitment to electricity market reform and to getting the Green investment bank and the green deal fully invested.
	I have long argued that Governments tend to produce too much legislation, often to placate the “something must be done” school or cultivate the tabloids, and we know where that has led us. I therefore strongly welcome the repeal of statute law that will get rid of more than 200 unnecessary laws. However, I do not accept the argument that the economic crisis means we should set aside our commitment to political reform in the shape of the recall of MPs or the democratisation of our second Chamber, which has been deferred for nearly 100 years.
	Twenty years ago, the Loyal Address was seconded by the current Secretary of State for International Development. I suppose that encouragingly demonstrates that seconding it can lead to greatness, but as the current Chair of the Select Committee on International Development, an honour I very much cherish, I am disappointed at the omission of legislation to enact the UK’s commitment to 0.7% of gross domestic product being provided for overseas development assistance. However, I recognise that legislation is not required for us to meet that commitment next year, and I very much welcome the fact that it was reinforced in the Queen’s Speech.
	As chair of the all-party group on deafness, may I pay tribute to Jack Ashley following his passing? He was a great support and encouragement to me, and he was always courteous, charming and humorous. He will be missed by many, but especially by the deaf community.
	It is 50 years ago this year that I joined the Liberal party and almost 29 years since I entered the House, so for all but the last two years I have been in opposition. The Leader of the Opposition is about to make his first reply to the debate on the Loyal Address. I know from experience that it is often easier to oppose, but the left in Europe is about to be tested on whether it has coherent and credible alternative policies. We need deficit reduction and growth. We are living through perhaps the most challenging times in living memory, but I came into politics to make a positive difference, to promote reform and to achieve a fairer, more liberal society. That remains my objective, and I commend the Loyal Address to the House.

Edward Miliband: I am sure the whole House will wish to join me in paying tribute to those who have died in Afghanistan since we last met: Guardsman Michael Roland of 1st Battalion the Grenadier Guards, and Corporal Andrew Roberts and Private Ratu Silibaravi of 23 Pioneer Regiment, the Royal Logistics Corps. They all showed the utmost bravery, and our thoughts are with their family and friends. Let me also say from this House that we support our mission in Afghanistan and will also support the Prime Minister in the important efforts that he is making to secure a political settlement there for when our troops have left.
	As is customary, I would also like to pay tribute to those Members who have died since the last Queen’s Speech. First, Alan Keen was hugely popular with Members of all parties. A football scout turned MP, he had faith in the power of sport and politics to change lives. He is missed sorely by his wife, Ann, and his family and friends.
	I also pay tribute to David Cairns, who was able to enter the House only because the law was changed to allow a former Catholic priest to sit in Parliament. He was funny, warm and principled, and his death one year ago today was a tragedy particularly for his partner, Dermot, and his many, many friends.
	In her diamond jubilee year, I would also like to pay tribute to Her Majesty the Queen. We are reminded yet again today of her tireless service to the people of this country, and we are all looking forward to the national celebrations later this year.
	My understanding is that, by tradition, the Loyal Address is proposed by a rising star of the governing party, who is thrusting his way forward on to the rungs of the ministerial ladder. Hon. Members of all parties can therefore agree that there could be no better choice than the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi). He spoke eloquently, movingly and with confidence, and I congratulate him on his remarks.
	I believe that the hon. Gentleman is the first Member of the House to have been born in Iraqi Kurdistan. He spoke about the people of Stratford-on-Avon and said that his background was not the issue. However, he said in an interview that I read:
	“What Britain gave my family was freedom and opportunity…to my family they weren’t just words, they changed our whole life.”
	He brings to the House a perspective that enriches us all.
	The hon. Gentleman also has the distinction of being the founder of the polling company YouGov. Let me say that I have spent much of the past 18 months thinking that he has a lot to answer for. No doubt, after recent weeks, the Prime Minister feels the same.
	I am used to seeing the hon. Gentleman as an enthusiastic Back Bencher—if I can put it like that—braying at me with particular vigour from a sedentary position during Prime Minister’s questions, so I am very happy to give him the endorsement he no doubt craves and recommend unequivocally that the Prime Minister give him ministerial preferment whenever the reshuffle comes. It would be his gain and mine.
	I also congratulate the seconder of the Loyal Address, the right hon. Member for Gordon (Malcolm Bruce). He brought his years of distinguished service and wisdom to the job. He brings great skill and experience to the House, including, as he said, as an assiduous and enthusiastic Chairman of the International Development Committee. In doing research on his background, I got extremely excited when someone in my office turned up a biography from the internet, which stated:
	“Malcolm Bruce also worked early in his career with Ozzy Osbourne and recently performed a Jimi Hendrix Birthday tribute.”
	Sadly for me and for him, it turned out to be a different Malcolm Bruce.
	However, the right hon. Gentleman continues to serve the Liberal Democrats in important ways, not least as their president in Scotland—I am sure he is very proud of that just now. No doubt he will play a crucial role in the inquest into that local election result in Edinburgh, where the Liberal Democrat candidate was beaten by a penguin. [Laughter.] Tory Members should not laugh too much because there are more pandas than Tory MPs in Scotland. I gently say to the right hon. Gentleman that he will have to do better than the explanation offered locally in Edinburgh that
	“it wasn’t a target ward”.
	The right hon. Gentleman has had a long and distinguished parliamentary career, which, under normal circumstances, would end up with service in the House of Lords, if it was not for his leader’s determination to abolish it. However, I pay tribute to him for his excellent speech.
	On the Gracious Speech, first, let me say that we will work with the Government on the Green investment bank, the defamation Bill and flexible parental leave, all of which sound remarkably like Labour ideas—because they are Labour ideas.
	This is the speech that was supposed to be the Government’s answer to the clear message from the electorate last week, but on today’s evidence, they still do not get it. For a young person looking for work, this speech offers nothing; for a family whose living standards are being squeezed, this speech offers nothing; for the millions of people who think the Government are not on their side, this speech offers nothing. “No change, no hope” is the real message of this Queen’s Speech.
	The Prime Minister and the Chancellor appear to believe that people are turning against them because they have not understood the Government’s economic policy, but the truth is that people have turned against them because they have understood it only too well. What did the Government promise two years ago? The Chancellor could not have been clearer in his emergency Budget, when he said there would be
	“a steady and sustained economic recovery, with low inflation and falling unemployment…a new model of economic growth”.—[Official Report, 22 June 2010; Vol. 512, c. 168.]
	What has he delivered? He has delivered the worst unemployment in 16 years, 1 million young people out of work and the first double-dip recession for 37 years. They promised recovery, but they delivered recession—a recession made in Downing street. They have failed.
	As if a failing plan was not bad enough, the Government added insult to injury in the Budget, by making millions pay more so that millionaires could pay less. There is no change on that in the Queen’s Speech either. I say to the Prime Minister that he should listen to people such as Linda Pailing, the deputy chair of Harlow Conservative party, who said of her constituents:
	“They don’t like the fact that he didn’t keep the 50p tax…people feel here that he is not working for them, he is working for his friends”.
	She said these elections are
	“to do with what Cameron and his cronies are doing”.
	It comes to something when even lifelong Tories do not believe that this Prime Minister is on their side. Last Thursday, the British people delivered a damning verdict on the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and their economic strategy. The Prime Minister says he gets it, but if he really does, the first thing—[Interruption.] Government Members say, “What about London?”, which is interesting. What did the Mayor of London say? He said he had “survived” the wind,
	“the rain, the BBC, the Budget and the endorsement of David Cameron”—[Laughter.]
	I think they walked into that one.

Edward Miliband: We had a whole amendment on that. I wish the hon. Gentleman, having listened to his constituents, had joined us in the Division Lobby to vote against the 50p tax change.
	The Prime Minister says he gets it. If he really did get it, the first thing he would have done in this Queen’s Speech was drop his tax cut for millionaires, but he has not done so. They are carrying on with a Finance Bill to put the 45p tax rate into law. Why are they doing that? Because they really believe that their problems are not those of policy, but those of public relations.
	What did the part-time Chancellor say at the weekend? He said:
	“I know the way the Budget was presented meant this message wasn’t heard.”
	The Deputy Prime Minister said:
	“An impression has formed that this was a budget for the rich”.
	It is insights like that which got him where he is today.
	The Government just do not get it. The problem is not the presentation of a tax cut for millionaires; it is the reality: £40,000 for every millionaire in Britain. It is not the presentation of cuts in tax credits; it is the reality. On the granny tax, the churches tax, the charities tax and the whole Budget omnishambles, it is not the presentation; it is the reality.

Edward Miliband: I will tell the hon. Gentleman what we did in government: we introduced the winter fuel allowance and took action on pre-payment meters—far more than this Government have ever done.
	Let us talk about those at the top of society, executive pay and multi-million pound bonuses—[ Interruption. ] It is very interesting that Conservative Members are groaning about that, because a few months ago, the Prime Minister said that he was outraged about crony capitalism. He told us that he was grossly offended by it and that it was not what he believed in. Such was his strength of feeling that in the entire Queen’s Speech, the issue did not merit a single mention.
	I have a suggestion for the Prime Minister. He should accept the recommendation of the High Pay Commission to put an ordinary worker on the remuneration committee of every company in Britain. I say, “If you can’t look one of your employees in the eye to justify that you’re worth it, then you shouldn’t be getting the salary.” Come to think of it, why not start with the Government? I have the ideal candidate to be the employee on the board judging the Cabinet. She stands ready to serve—the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries). Let us remind ourselves why she is so well qualified. She said:
	“They are two arrogant posh boys who show no remorse, no contrition, and no passion to understand the lives of others.”
	She is only saying what so many people are thinking: it is high time the shareholder spring came to the Conservative party.
	On the economy, on living standards, and on executive pay—

Edward Miliband: I have been generous in giving way.
	On all the major issues, the Government have shown that they are out of touch. If we need any further proof, let us consider what they have done on crime—taking police off the streets with 20% cuts and stripping back powers on antisocial behaviour.
	Let me turn to one of the biggest omissions in the Queen’s Speech. There is no bigger challenge facing families up and down the country than care for elderly relatives, and there was no clearer promise from the Government than that they would legislate on it. [Interruption.] I know Government Members do not want to talk about what is happening in the Government, but in their foreword to the health White Paper, the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister said that there would be
	“legislation in the second session of this parliament to establish a sustainable legal and financial framework for adult social care”.
	Instead, we have nothing. [Interruption.] The Prime Minister says there is a draft Bill, but he said he would legislate in this Session, and he has failed to do so. They have totally failed to do so. There was a clear promise. [Interruption.] The Prime Minister should calm down. They promised a Bill on social care, but they chose not to include one.
	There is room in the Queen’s Speech for House of Lords reform, however. I am a supporter of House of Lords reform and a referendum, but I thought that a Queen’s Speech was supposed to define a Government’s priorities. So there is a mystery that the Prime Minister needs to explain in his reply. Over the weekend, the Chancellor said that House of Lords reform
	“is certainly not my priority, it is not the priority of the Government.”
	So it is not the Conservative party’s priority. But the mystery deepens, because the Deputy Prime Minister said yesterday that there were many, many other things he cared far more about. So apparently it is not his priority either. [Interruption.] Government Members ask if it is our priority. No, it is not. I am bound to ask, though: if it is not a priority, how on earth did it end up in the Queen’s Speech? I thought the Queen’s Speech was supposed to define the priorities for the Government’s legislative programme. Why is it in there? How did it get into the speech?
	What about the things that did not make it into the Queen’s Speech? How about the manifesto promise—the Prime Minister’s detoxification promise—to enshrine in law spending 0.7% of national income on aid. [Interruption.] They are not putting it in law. [Interruption.] The Prime Minister keeps saying he is doing it, when all he is doing is publishing draft Bills. And what has happened to something that used to be a big priority for the Prime Minister? He said in 2010 that lobbying was
	“the next big scandal waiting to happen.”
	He was right. It did happen—to him: Adam Werritty, whose lobbying caused the downfall of the Defence Secretary; Peter Cruddas, Tory party treasurer, offering
	Downing street dinners to donors; and Fred Michel and the 163 pages of e-mails. Three lobbying scandals, but no Bill!
	Last week, the Prime Minister applied to have prior access to the evidence of Leveson as a core participant. I have to say that he is one of the few people left who did not already think he was a core participant in the whole News Corporation scandal: he hired the editor, he sent the texts, he even rode the horse, and his Culture Secretary backed the bid. It does not get much more core than that. This is not just a Westminster story because it shows whose side the Prime Minister is on. What did he say to Rebekah Brooks after she was forced to resign following revelations that Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked? We learn from the newspapers that he said:
	“Sorry I couldn’t have been as loyal to you as you have been to me.”
	That goes to the very heart of the problem with this Government and this Prime Minister: they stand up for the wrong people. Two years ago in the rose garden they promised change. Yesterday in the tractor factory all they could offer was more of the same. The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister: two leaders out of touch with the country, out of touch even with their own parties, locked together not on principle or policy but in determination to hang on to office for another three years. So halfway through this Government and particularly after last Thursday, is it not time that the Government stopped governing for the few and started listening to the many?

Caroline Lucas: The Prime Minister talks of threats to our national security. In that context, can he explain why, given the urgency of the climate crisis that faces us, the Queen’s Speech contains nothing to deal with it except provision for a Green investment bank that will still not be able to borrow, and a Bill that is likely to lock us into high-cost, high-carbon gas production? Is it because he does not want to show climate leadership, or because he has been overruled by his Chancellor?

David Cameron: I am a bit disappointed by what the hon. Lady has said, because the Green investment bank has £3 billion to spend on green investments. This is the sort of proposal that has been included in Labour manifestos, Conservative manifestos and Liberal Democrat manifestos for years. Now we are delivering it on the ground, and that will make a difference.
	We should always, in this country, stand on the side of freedom, and we should remember that it is 30 years since our taskforce landed on the Falkland islands to defend the islanders’ right to remain British. I am sure that the House will join me in paying tribute to the 255 British servicemen who gave their lives in the defence of freedom. Three decades have not dimmed our memories of their bravery, nor have they dimmed this country’s resolve. Make no mistake: for as long as the people of the Falkland islands wish to remain British, that is exactly how it will be.
	Let me say exactly what this Queen’s Speech is about. It is about a Government making the tough, long-term decisions to restore our country to strength—dealing with the deficit, rebalancing the economy, and building a society that rewards people who work hard and do the right thing.

David Cameron: The youth contract, which is going to do enormous amounts on youth unemployment, started last month. We achieved 450,000 apprenticeships
	last year. The Work programme is well under way now, helping half a million people, and it is the biggest back-to-work programme in this country since the 1930s.
	Let me explain that there are a number of important measures in this Queen’s Speech to promote growth and jobs. As well as the Work programme and the youth contract, we have the national loan guarantee scheme, with £20 billion to get cheaper loans flowing to small businesses. The most important work of the Government is implementing all those schemes and programmes, but we must do more to rebalance our economy. It is clear what went wrong. The public sector grew too large, our economy became unbalanced between north and south and we ended up too dependent on financial services. So we know what we need to do as a country. We must revive the private sector, spread growth and jobs across the country and make sure that financial services truly serve the economy—not the other way around.
	To expand the private sector we need to cut the burdens on business and make it easier for employers to take people on. That is in our enterprise Bill. To make the most of growth in the energy sector, including gas, nuclear and renewables, we need to reform the energy market, and that is what the energy Bill will do. To make the most of green investment, we need to legislate properly for the Green investment bank, with £3 billion of money in its coffers. That will be done through the measures announced in the Queen’s Speech as well.
	Another key issue is the need to clean up the financial system, and I have to say to the shadow Chancellor, who sat and did nothing while the financial sector melted down, that he ought to focus on this part of the Queen’s Speech. As the Governor of the Bank of England said last week, there are three vital steps to take, and we will be taking all of them: proper regulation at last by the Bank of England, the banks being made to hold enough capital to keep them safe, and a regime that means that if they do fail they can fail without the taxpayer picking up the bill. Those are all things that the shadow Chancellor never did when he was the City Minister.

David Davis: The simple truth is that when the House reacted understandably to the horrific events of 9/11 and the preceding terrorist events, such as the USS Cole
	and the east African embassy bombings, and introduced a couple of measures: the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, it took away many previous protections. Before RIPA, the agencies would approach British Telecom or Cable & Wireless and ask for the data, which were sometimes—not always—handed over voluntarily. The companies exercised some responsibility. In about two thirds of cases, the agencies got warrants, and the information had to be handed over. The central, though not the only issue is whether the databases are available to the agencies of the state without a warrant. They are currently available without a warrant. If we want to make such practices acceptable in a civilised, liberal state, we should have warrants first.

Nigel Dodds: The hon. Lady puts forward an important issue for our consideration. Many of the banks are largely owned by the public at the moment. One leading business man in Northern Ireland told me recently that he regretted that we had not gone the whole way and taken complete control of the banks, to ensure that all the necessary lending could take place. Members of the public, taxpayers, ordinary hard-working families, individuals and businesses are pumping billions of pounds into the banking system, yet the banks are not doing what needs to be done to ease credit and lend in the way that they should.
	I was talking about House of Lords reform, and other Members have rightly raised issues that are of real concern to the people and the communities that they represent. Before we get on to the reform of the House of Lords, I would like to see this House deal with an issue relating to the House of Commons. The Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland said on record during the last Session that they believe that it is wrong that Members who do not take their seats in the House of Commons are still able to receive full expenses, allowances and representational moneys, which puts them in a much more advantageous position than those of us who do take our seats. Sinn Fein, for instance, gets the equivalent of parliamentary Short money—what is called representative money—and is free to spend it, not on parliamentary activities, of course, because they do not engage in any parliamentary activities, but on party political activities. Whereas we as right hon. and hon. Members would rightly be called to account by the authorities for any spending—even a penny’s worth—for party political purposes, a group of Members who do not take their seats are quite free to spend that money to the disadvantage of their political opponents. Let us be frank: it does not particularly affect our votes, but it affects those of others in the House who are not here today and no doubt can speak for themselves in due course. The fact is that Members who do not take their seats are given an enormous advantage.
	We know that back in 2001, Betty Boothroyd, the former great Speaker of the House, resisted all this for a long time. Ultimately, the decision was taken to proceed with the concessions because the then Labour Government said—it was bitterly opposed by Conservative Members—that it was important to bring people into the peace process and the political process. Whatever the arguments at that time, the fact of the matter is that there is no longer any need for this special category of expenditure on the basis of encouraging people to be part of the peace process. It is clear that people are involved in the Executive and in the Assembly at Stormont. I welcome that, and think it enormously to the credit of parties in this House and in Northern Ireland that progress has been made, but it would not make the slightest difference to the political process—nobody believes that it would—if these special arrangements were withdrawn in line with what was promised before the election and in the last parliamentary Session.

Simon Hughes: The answer is yes, and if the hon. Lady will bear with me, I will deal later with Lords reform, as it is in the Queen’s Speech and the programme for the coming year.
	We need to remember where we were two years ago: there was turmoil in Greece and in the eurozone, and our constituents were paying out of their money—not our money—£120 million a day just in servicing the interest repayments on our debt. That is not a way to use taxpayers’ money for the good. There was a financial crisis caused by a banking system that was entirely focused on short-term gain for the people at the top—as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills said regularly in the previous Parliament—rather than on creating long-term value for the many small businesses that provide work for most people across the country. The public finances were out of control, we had the largest public deficit in the developed world and the living standards of those on low and middle incomes were being eroded, which had been gradually reducing the spending power of the British consumer over the previous decade. The cost of living was spiralling; for younger people, certainly in constituencies such as mine, a home had become an
	unaffordable dream. The economic system often encouraged people to take as much as possible for themselves rather than incentivising them to create long-term value and spread wealth and work as widely as possible, and the economy was reliant on energy from scarce resources, the price of which was rising year after year.
	Two years later, we are still not where we need to be. We have unacceptably high unemployment, especially youth unemployment, which started long before this Government came to office and was on a significant upward trend in the last years of the Labour Administration. We are in an economic recession and banks are still not lending enough to viable small businesses, as we all know from our constituency casework, whereas the pay of those at the top is rising more than can possibly be justified by their performance. We heard the figures just this week: an 11% increase in salaries at the top last year, whereas the increase for the working population as a whole was 1%.
	It is therefore absolutely right that the Government continue to focus on doing all we can to promote economic growth and recovery, it is right that we continue with the programme we set out and it is right that we have a programme that, as the last Budget did, seeks to put more money into the pockets of those low and middle income working people and to make work pay. The programme should regulate the banks, encourage the growth of renewable energy and put the public finances back on a sustainable footing so that the spending priorities of the Government, about which we care—health care, education and support for the less well-off—can be adequately financed. No Government have ever invested in better schools or hospitals by bankrupting themselves.
	It has been difficult and we on the Liberal Democrat Benches know that. There was no parliamentary majority for getting rid of tuition fees and we were not able to deliver that—it just became undeliverable. The Health and Social Care Bill, the Welfare Reform Bill and the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill needed significant changes and we changed them and made them hugely better—all of them. The evidence is there in the legislation that is now on the statute book.
	The Budget was grossly misrepresented. Its most significant element was that many millions of people were taken out of paying tax. Many more will be lifted out of tax next year and the year after, so that nobody will have to pay anything in tax on their first £10,000 of income. It was also forgotten that last month pensioners had the largest increase ever in the state pension since it was introduced by the post-war Government. Then there was the youth contract, the huge growth in the number of apprenticeships, and the support for further education.
	There has already been huge success, but we must ensure that we focus on the priorities. The Gracious Speech started by setting them out very clearly: economic growth, justice and constitutional reform. We are proud on the Liberal Democrat Benches that the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, my right hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Vince Cable), will see through the creation of the Green investment bank in Edinburgh, for which some of us, as members of an environmental party, have argued for many years and will now see delivered. We are proud that the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, our right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr Davey), will introduce an energy Bill to give us low-carbon energy generation and to develop renewables, which
	have a fantastic future—not just onshore, but offshore, tidal, wind and wave, and not just around Scotland but in the whole of the United Kingdom. We are determined to deliver cheaper electricity and greater security of supply.
	My hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George) and others have campaigned for ages for a grocery code adjudicator Bill, and we are delivering that. It will ensure that farmers, local suppliers and local growers get good value for their products and are not trampled on by the power of the monopoly supermarket in their area. The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, my good and hon. Friend the Member for Thornbury and Yate (Steve Webb)—a Liberal Democrat Minister for Pensions—and his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, with whom he works so well, are determined to deliver the new single tier pension to ensure that by the end of this Parliament people will have, rather than the sum of just under £100 a week they get as the state pension at the moment, about £140 a week. That is particularly valuable to women, the low paid and those who have been self-employed. After 30 years of work, people will have a citizen’s pension, for which we have always fought.
	The Minister of State, Department for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather)and others are determined, as the Deputy Prime Minister has been, that we should have flexible parental care leave, flexible parental leave and the right to flexible working. Why? They are not just good for the parent and the child, but they allow the parent to stay in work rather than giving it up and to be able to mix work, home, children and a career. That is really important for women’s equality in this country. Why do we not have many women in this place or on boards? It is partly because we do not have those flexible arrangements.

Iain Wright: You will never hear from me, Mr Deputy Speaker, any criticism of trying to get as many start-ups as possible. I would welcome a culture of enterprise and allowing businesses to grow, but firms that are starting up are being penalised by not being given access to finance and capital to allow them to do so.
	The Gracious Speech referred to the introduction of
	“legislation to reform competition law to promote enterprise and fair markets.”
	I hope that the Government will confirm that that Bill will contain measures to curb excessive executive remuneration and encourage increased shareholder activism, as that was not specifically mentioned in the Queen’s Speech. I also hope that they will legislate to implement all—I emphasise all—the sensible and widely accepted recommendations of the High Pay Commission earlier this year on matters such as simplification of executive remuneration, standardisation of reporting to ensure that meaningful comparisons can take place, and, importantly, the inclusion of employee representation on remuneration committees. Recent events at the likes of UBS, Trinity Mirror, Barclays, AstraZeneca and Aviva have shown that there is shareholder appetite for ensuring that poor performance is not rewarded through excessive pay. I hope that the High Pay Commission’s recommendations will be implemented in full.
	I hope that the reference in the Queen’s Speech to “repealing unnecessary legislation” will not mean stripping away workers’ rights. Making it easier to fire people does not create jobs, employment or economic growth; instead, such an environment creates a Victorian-mill-owner culture of bad bosses being accepted and enshrined in legislation. It will do nothing to stimulate consumer confidence or growth in demand, which are so very vital. It is also wrong to suggest that the level of employment protection and rises in unemployment are
	closely correlated, as David Blanchflower points out in his article in
	The Independent
	today. He argues that Germany and the Netherlands have much higher levels of employment protection than the UK but experienced a much smaller rise in unemployment during the recession and its aftermath.

Stephen Dorrell: My hon. Friend leads me neatly to my next point. It seems to me to be an odd argument to suggest that if the Government have not yet clearly made up their mind precisely how they propose to deliver the important issue of social care reform, it then becomes a source of criticism that there is not a Bill with a commitment to legislate. I am old-fashioned enough—as my hon. Friend suggests most of us interested in this issue are—to think that the most important issue is to deliver a clear policy and then to legislate. I do not criticise the insistence that we have a clear policy before we have a Bill and a commitment to legislate.
	I welcome the fact that the process of clarification of policy is continuing, provided that it takes us beyond discussion about funding. While Dilnott made some important points about the need for a fairer system of distributing the cost burden among those who pay for social care—some of those ideas will be part of the eventual conclusion on health and social care—the problem is that he was asked to answer the wrong question, and that is becoming increasingly obvious as the public discussion continues. The question put to Dilnott was how to restructure the payment arrangements for the existing structure of social care. But if we step back from the question of funding and look at how care is actually delivered in each locality—between the social care system, the primary health care system and the community health care system—the inescapable conclusion is that the structure is no longer fit for purpose. It was designed primarily to deliver health care to people who had a burden of disease that was the pattern 30, 40 or 50 years ago, whereas today’s health and care system needs to meet the needs of a very different group of patients. It is a difficult thing to measure, but depending on how one chooses to do so, between two thirds and three quarters of the resources employed in the health and care system are devoted to people with long-term, complex needs. Their requirement is for joined-up care that supports them and enables them to lead lives that are as full as possible during the period of their longer life expectancy.

Tony Baldry: I think that Members of all parties would endorse the support of the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) for the Queen’s Speech proposal to introduce legislation to establish an independent adjudicator to ensure that supermarkets deal fairly and lawfully with suppliers. That is clearly one of many proposals that will have all-party support.
	In reflecting on the Queen’s Speech, it is probably sensible to consider where we are and where we have been. In recalling where we are, it is important to remember that the Prime Minister’s party does not have a parliamentary majority. After the general election, it was clearly in the nation’s interest to form a coalition. A coalition, however, requires compromise every day. To govern, the Prime Minister has to agree policy initiatives with a political party very different from his own. In practice, the coalition is working a lot better than many would have imagined. The fact is that the Conservative party did not win enough seats or votes to enable us to deliver all our manifesto pledges. The solution is not to blame the coalition, but to seek to win more votes next time.
	Notwithstanding the challenges of the coalition, the Government have, since the general election, embarked on a vast reforming programme unprecedented in modern times to reduce the structural deficit and to put through reforms of the NHS that will enable GPs better to design local NHS services for their patients. The Government have reformed primary and secondary education, introduced a new system of university tuition fees and completely overhauled the welfare system to ensure that as many people as possible can live responsible and worthwhile lives free of state dependency. The Government have capped housing benefit and passed
	the European Union Act 2011 so that in future any EU treaty that transfers powers to the European Union will be subject to a referendum, and never again will a Government be able to surrender sovereignty to Brussels without the full consent of the British people. On Europe, too, the Prime Minister and the Government have vetoed the fiscal pact. Ministers have swept away pages and pages of planning regulations, but in so doing have still managed to protect the green belt, while providing local councillors and local communities with the opportunity to design and develop their own local plans free of top-down Whitehall directives such as regional spatial strategies.
	The Government are introducing elected police commissioners and reforming public sector pensions that would otherwise become unaffordable and unsustainable. Importantly, the Government have taken millions of the low paid out of income tax and have cut corporation tax. We inherited corporation tax at 28% , but by 2014, it will be reduced to 22%. As a result, the UK will have the lowest main corporation tax rate in the G7 and the fourth lowest in the G20. To help businesses further, the Government have introduced a £20 billion national loan guarantee scheme to get cheaper loans to businesses. These have been bold reforms and they have all been achieved without a Conservative majority.
	It is not only that the Prime Minister has had to govern with a party that does not have a parliamentary majority, as the second reality is that the Government have no money—and it is not unreasonable to think that a Government with no majority and no money will have problems. We should never forget that the Labour Government left Britain with a deficit that, at £160 billion, was bigger than Greece’s. The Labour Government gave us the longest and deepest recession on record, so that we were one of the first countries into recession and one of the last countries coming out of recession. We should never forget the telling letter left to his successor by the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne):
	“Chief Secretary, I’m afraid there is no money. Kind regards—and good luck!”
	That pithy 13-word message—whether it was tongue in cheek or not—well summed up the 13 years of the Labour Government.

Tony Baldry: Yes, this Government have probably achieved more in two years than the Blair Government achieved in the whole of the first term of the Blair Government.

Tony Baldry: The hon. Gentleman has just heard me comment on the legacy of his Government, so I find it extraordinary that he has the cheek and audacity to ask such a question. The Labour Government left the country with no money and the biggest debt crisis of our lifetime.
	Indeed, over many years, this country built up massive debts, which we have to pay off. Of course, it is much more difficult to do that when so much of the rest of Europe is in recession. As I suspect France will soon demonstrate, trying to pile debt upon debt is what got Britain and Europe into such difficulties in the first place. It did not work for Britain over 13 years of a Labour Government and would not work now. The eurozone’s troubles are caused by too much debt, the burden of excessive public spending and the burden of excessive public borrowing. It is not surprising that Government are seeking the approval of Parliament relating to the agreed financial stability mechanism within the euro area.
	It is no mean task recovering from the deepest recession in living memory, accompanied as it was by a debt crisis. Our banks had too much debt; our households had too much debt; and the Government had too much debt. As Sir Mervyn King, commenting on the performance of the last Government, observed in “The Today Lecture” that he gave last week while the House was in recess:
	“Bailing out the banks came too late though to prevent the financial crisis from spilling over into the world economy. The realisation of the true state of the banking system led to a collapse of confidence around the world...unemployment in Britain rose by over a million....to many this will seem deeply unfair and it is. I can understand why so many people are angry.”
	One can speculate only that perhaps more than a million people may have lost their jobs unnecessarily because the previous Government failed to act on warnings from the Bank of England.
	Notwithstanding the challenge, Britain has so far hung on to our triple-A credit rating. We have kept a lid on borrowing costs and, compared with other countries in the eurozone, many of which are in the process of changing leaders or just starting to tackle their debts, we are thriving.

Geraint Davies: Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the big debate is the balance between the need for growth and the need for cuts to lower the deficit? Does he accept that, as we entered 2010, two thirds of the deficit was caused by the banks and the remaining third by the then Labour Government—who had invested
	more than they were earning, but who had done so with good reason to project a positive growth trajectory? In hindsight, does he accept that the balance between growth and cuts is wrong, and that we should act on the mandate in Europe and invest more in growth and less in cuts?

Tony Baldry: The hon. Gentleman was so excited by my speech that he misheard me. I made no reference to the Government’s cutting interest rates. What I said was that the Government’s financial and economic policies had enabled us, and were still enabling us, to keep interest rates low, while also ensuring that our interest rates compared with those of Germany. I have absolutely no doubt that if we followed the economic policies advocated by Opposition Front Benchers, we would soon see interest rates, including mortgage interest rates, soaring as a consequence.
	The Government have taken 2 million people out of tax, they have continued to freeze council tax, and—as I have already observed—they have cut corporation tax so that we can compete with the rest of the world. Moreover, notwithstanding the challenges at home, Britain is meeting its commitments overseas. We are behaving as one would expect of a permanent member of the UN Security Council, honouring our obligations in Afghanistan, seeking to reduce the threat of nuclear proliferation—particularly with Iran—and helping to bring greater stability to the horn of Africa. We are supporting democrats in Libya, and, through the Department for International Development, we are helping to tackle poverty around the world.
	We should be proud that Britain is sticking to its aid promises. We are a friend to the world’s poorest, and giving aid represents the best of British values. Some 40 years after they first promised to give 0.7% of their national income in aid, rich countries are less than halfway there. Among the major economies, only we in the UK are on target to meet our commitments. Some of the more Poujadist elements of the press claim that public support for aid is diminishing. I suspect that that is because some two thirds of the public think that we spend up to 20 times more on foreign aid than we actually do. Once people know that our aid budget is just over a single penny in every pound spent by the Government, they are much more supportive.
	Understandably, the Session of Parliament since the general election has been unusually long, but it is still impressive that the Government have passed more than 30 main programme Bills since the election to help to reduce the UK’s budget deficit and reform our public services. Their programme has been guided by the three core values of responsibility, fairness and freedom. The new Session will be shorter, so it will provide scope for fewer Bills. I do not think that there was any doubt on the doorsteps about what our constituents want us to focus on. They want us to continue to get the economy going, continue to improve the NHS, and continue to sort out welfare and education; and, importantly, they want us to demonstrate that we are on the side of those who are working hard and doing the best they can for their families.
	One of the best kept secrets of the last Budget is that the Chancellor raised personal allowances—the amount that people can earn before being taxed—so that 24 million middle-earning taxpayers will keep more of their money, and, from next April, 2 million low-paid people will not pay income tax at all. I can tell those who call for tax
	cuts that this year we have already made the largest tax cuts for more than a decade. I think everyone would agree that we should be doing all that we can to help families who are trying to do the best for themselves.
	Of course we need to focus on jobs and economic growth. I am very glad that the proposals in a report by my constituent Adrian Beecroft for streamlining of the rules that make it hard for businesses to hire and fire employees are to be taken up. Redundancy rules, employment tribunals and rules about unfair dismissal all need to be changed, as Adrian Beecroft’s well-researched and well-argued report clearly demonstrates. We should be doing everything possible to encourage employers to expand and employ more people.
	It is good news that the Government will reduce burdens on businesses by repealing unnecessary legislation and legislating to limit the state inspection of businesses. It is also good news that they will reform competition law in order to promote enterprise and fair markets. I think that many businesses will welcome the news that there is to be strengthened regulation of the financial services sector, and that the recommendations of the Independent Commission on Banking are to be implemented.
	I also welcome the proposals relating to pensions. I think everyone agrees on the need to modernise the pensions system and reform the state pension, and on the importance of creating a fair and sustainable foundation for private saving. Governments must always seek to be on the side of those who save for retirement. I do not think that anyone seriously believes that it is possible to avoid reforming public service pensions in line with the recommendations of the Independent Public Service Pensions Commission.
	As co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on carers, I particularly welcome the news that a draft Bill is to be published to modernise adult care and support in England. The health White Paper of July 2010 promised legislation on adult social care in a second session of the present Parliament. We have all had plenty of time in which to read and digest the Dilnot report, which recommended a system under which people would pay the first chunk of nursing care costs and the state would pay after that. Given our increasingly ageing population, we need clarity, and cross-party talks have been taking place for a long time.
	I also welcome the news that this is to be a draft Bill. Given such a major overhaul of social care legislation that needs to stand the test of time, and given the number of Select Committee reports on the issue, it is vital that we have an opportunity to get it right by co-operating with the Government, the Opposition and, indeed, every party in the House to produce legislation that seeks to achieve the right outcomes for everyone concerned.

Meg Hillier: Will the hon. Gentleman allow me to continue for a short while?
	One of my principal objections to the current House of Lords reform proposals is that I do not agree with the argument that we are making the House of Lords more accountable by having Members elected for a single term of 15 years without being able to stand for re-election. I cannot see how, in a democratic system, that is accountable. Members of the House of Commons have to face the electorate once every five years, and we have witnessed colleagues losing their seats as the electors have made that decision based either on the individual or their party. That is true accountability, although it has been weakened by proposals to change the boundaries every five years, as some electors will therefore never have the chance to vote again for the MP who has represented them. The Government are doing great damage by reducing the accountability of the Members of both Houses. That is a backward step, but it is being dressed up as reform. We must reflect and improve on these proposals if we are to have real change.
	I come at this subject as a democrat. I believe that it is beyond the pale to have even an element of heredity in the House of Lords, and that that is rightly out of kilter with modern attitudes. We must not rush headlong into trying to improve the situation and see any change as an improvement. Instead, we must take measured steps and ensure that Parliament properly represents the people, and that we do not fill the House of Lords with stooges who have been selected by party leaders and who never have to face the electorate.
	Although I look forward to our debates on this subject, I have to say that it was not raised even once on the doorsteps in my constituency during the most recent election campaign. Indeed, I am usually out on doorsteps while on roving surgeries a couple of times every month, and the last time I canvassed opinion on this topic everybody said they supported a democratically elected House of Lords save for one person who was of Nigerian origin and believed there was some merit in the hereditary principle. His was a lone voice, however. We need democracy, but not in the way that is being proposed.
	The Queen’s Speech was a big disappointment. When I was watching it, I suddenly realised that it was nearly over, but many of the issues I had hoped it would address had not been mentioned. It is flimsy and expresses no compelling vision of what the Government want to achieve for this country. We agree with the opening sentence, but its sentiments were not backed up by proposed legislation. There is also no strategic approach to the economic crisis. We repeatedly hear about the need to tackle the deficit, but there are other issues that need to be tackled alongside dealing appropriately with the Government’s finances.
	The Queen’s Speech demonstrates that the Government are out of touch and unfair, and we are also increasingly seeing signs of incompetence. The Prime Minister acknowledged that the economy is a higher priority than House of Lords reform, but the Queen’s Speech does little to tackle the economic problems, and I am particularly concerned for the businesses in my constituency and about unemployment.
	The unfairness is seen in the retention of the cut in the 50p tax rate, helping the top 1% of earners in this country, while many of my constituents are keen to work but are unable to find the extra eight hours they will need to continue to receive tax credits. At one end, therefore, families who are doing everything they should—they are working hard and trying to work more, but are unable to find those extra hours—are losing out. What they need is some extra hours from their employer, as it is currently very hard to find another job. At the other end, however, millionaires are saving thousands of pounds in tax. That does not strike me or my constituents as fair.
	Fortunately for the Government, I do not have sufficient time to dwell on their increasing incompetence. I might mention, however, the border controls fiasco that has been going on since last autumn. It is continuing now, which is especially serious given that we are in the run-up to the Olympics. I might also mention the youth unemployment figures. The Government’s incompetence in that regard will affect a generation of our young people and their families. There are also the ministerial dalliances with BSkyB, which demonstrate a real lack of appropriateness, to put it politely.
	There were some announcements in the Gracious Speech that I welcome. I have long been a supporter of the Green investment bank. My big concern is that it is being introduced too late, even though there will be £3 billion of funding—although not all of it is certain. Will the bank be able to move quickly enough to ensure we secure the green investment required to help businesses grow and create the jobs we so desperately need? The environmental ship might have already sailed to other ports in Germany, China and other countries, whose Governments are far ahead of ours.
	I also welcome the flexible parental leave proposals. It is important that people have that choice, but it must be couched in the right way so that women do not feel forced to go back to work and pass over the care of the child, whom they may still be nursing, to their partner. The principle of allowing families freedom over how they manage their own affairs is important, however.
	Overall, the Government’s economic policy is hurting and it is not working—not in my constituency. Unemployment is rising. It is the worst we have seen for 16 years and of course, youth unemployment—I am on the record as having spoken about this a number of times before—is a real scourge of our society.
	There are a couple of proposals I welcome. I welcome the intention to ensure through the children and families Bill that there is an all-through assessment for children and young adults. Too often, my constituents have experienced breaks in the support for their children, either at the age at which they transfer to a different school or when they transition into adulthood. Personal budgets provide a real opportunity for those young people and their families to have control as long as there are safeguards for the many families with whom I deal who would not be able to manage those budgets themselves. We must not throw out the baby with the bathwater and although I welcome the personal budgets, we must ensure that there is a safety net and support for those who are unable to do the necessary paperwork and to manage the employment side of it. The detail will matter if the good intentions in the Bill are to be met, and I look forward to working with my colleagues on my Front Bench to ensure that those needs are considered.
	I hope that the children and families Bill will talk about ensuring that children are protected and supported. That seems to be the general feeling. I am concerned, however, that although the Government are considering protecting and supporting certain groups of children on the one hand, actions by other Ministers on safeguarding—such as the suggestion that faith leaders should be exempt from vetting and, if necessary, exempt from being barred from working with children—are a very worrying step. We must be vigilant about ensuring that we do not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The Government are very keen to talk about rolling back the frontiers of the state and rolling back red tape, but as far as the protection of children is concerned, when we put our children—and vulnerable adults, too—in the presence of a stranger, we need some surety that that stranger has been properly vetted. It is not acceptable to rule out one group simply on the basis that they are faith leaders.
	Businesses in Hackney have been struggling for some time. We have had some great successes—Silicon roundabout is in my constituency—but they are largely small start-ups and are finding it hard to grow. We have some very innovative business models in a very innovative part of London, but businesses in Hackney are struggling to get loans and even, in many cases, an overdraft facility from their bank. The Prime Minister spoke earlier about Project Merlin, saying that it had worked and that the loan guarantee fund was generous. It is not so much the level of a loan that is an issue, however, but the fact that banks will not loan in the first place. There is an opportunity that has perhaps not yet been missed in the Gracious Speech—we will see whether it has when we have the detail of the legislation—to consider alternative funding methods for businesses. Innovators out there are prepared to fund innovative businesses in a different way and we must ensure that they are properly supported and regulated so that investors and businesses are protected. There are opportunities for more mutuals in the banking sector, which ought to focus on investment in their own areas, helped by their understanding of their locality. They would, of course, be owned by their members.
	That brings me on to one thing that was missing from the Gracious Speech. As a Co-op and Labour MP, I was keen to hear the co-operatives consolidation Bill debated during the next Session, but it is not here. Where has that Bill gone? It would have been supported across the House. The previous Government did a great deal to change the law on co-operatives and to provide new legislation that made it easier to set them up, but as that was done piecemeal through different Acts of Parliament, there was room to bring it all together. Consolidation Bills, by their nature, are complicated and difficult, but it would have provided the platform for the introduction of yet more opportunities for mutuals and co-operatives. There is a feeling across this House, shared by members within every party—although it is not necessarily the view of every party—that there needs to be a different way of doing business in this country. If there is a better way of doing business than mutuals, which are owned by their members, who benefit from and see the direct outcomes of that ownership, I do not know what it is.
	There is no commitment in the Queen’s Speech to introduce any mutual models at all, as far as we can see. The water Bill would have offered such an opportunity
	and the energy Bill might have offered opportunities for some mutual solutions, as would, of course, the banking Bill. We need new measures on demutualisation and we have already missed an opportunity through the selling off to the highest bidder, rather than remutualisation, of Northern Rock. If the House is united on the need for banking reform, why not join that up with the idea of the mutual model and ensure that businesses as well as individuals are supported by mutuals?
	Another element missing from the Bill that is a concern to my constituents and to me is the antisocial behaviour legislation that we had hoped might be introduced. The message is very confused. One whole year ago, the Government’s consultation on antisocial behaviour finished. They have done the work, yet 12 months on there is no Bill in the Gracious Speech to deal with those issues. A year ago, the Government all but announced their intention to end antisocial behaviour orders, but there is no Bill to do that and the police and residents are left confused about where they stand.
	The Government regularly pass the buck to local police forces when challenged on crime issues, but they are robbing them of the tools to do the job. We know that ASBOs require better enforcement and we accept that they are not perfect in every way, but they could be strengthened to deal better with the problem of repeat victimisation. The Government should be trying to build on what is in place and on what has been shown to work, rather than starting again from scratch. We hear that the Government has a plan for a community trigger, which would only guarantee action if five different households reported the same incident. For me, if one person complains that incident of antisocial behaviour needs to be tackled. It should be taken seriously and investigated.
	We also have an alphabet soup of other proposals. The crime prevention injunction and criminal behaviour orders do not do what they say on the tin. I know from experience with gang injunctions in Hackney that it can take a very long time for agencies on the ground to get used to the new powers, for the Crown Prosecution Service to deal with them properly, for courts to understand them and for them to embed. ASBOs might not have been perfect, but they were in the language of my constituents and of constituents up and down the country. People understood them and so did the system. To throw them out without having proper plans in place to replace them is a big mistake.
	My constituency has a number of challenges. We have heard from others about youth unemployment. In my constituency, one in four young people under the age of 24 is out of work. Our overall unemployment rate is 12.7%. Those challenges have a major impact on child poverty. There are still children in my constituency who turn up to school after a long summer holiday malnourished in September because their parents have chaotic lifestyles and have been unable to get them fed. We all support measures to get people into work, but to have a whole generation of young people who are unable to get work or work experience will, I fear, lead to greater challenges for their children.
	I do not have time to go into the figures for the ethnic breakdown of unemployment, but let us just take the example of young black men. About 55% of young
	black men are out of work, which is a staggering figure and much higher than the general norm. It risks becoming a real divide in this country if it is not tackled. It might not be an issue for every hon. Member in this House—as the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) said, his is not a kaleidoscope county—but let me tell hon. Members that my constituency is a kaleidoscope constituency, as are many others. It is a great strength of our area, but we must not have one group of people so badly affected by Government policy.
	Other issues have not been tackled. Housing benefit levels have been cut, rents have continued to rise by a great deal in my constituency and house prices have risen, too. That means that my constituents face a real challenge on housing and homes and nothing in this Queen’s Speech will tackle that, which is a serious mistake. It demonstrates again how the Government are very much out of touch with what really matters to people. Families want to be in a position to support themselves and my constituents’ requirements are very limited in many respects. They are not as demanding as they should be, I believe, but they want a job, a good school for their child, a health service that will work and to know that they can afford a roof over their heads. The job and the roof over their heads are particular challenges at the moment, so although we have these esoteric debates in the Westminster village about House of Lords reform—an issue not once raised on the doorstep—and as much as I think we need to reform the House of Lords, right now the energy of this place should be focused on how to move this country forward, invest in jobs and growth and ensure that we create job opportunities and homes for constituents in my constituency and up and down the country.

Charlie Elphicke: Has my hon. Friend noticed that as well as earning money at our expense Tony Blair does not seem to pay an awful lot of tax either?

David Amess: I do not accept what the hon. Gentleman says but I am sure that you would get a little tired, Mr Deputy Speaker, if I were to rehearse all that has gone on in this place in terms of the Conservative party leadership.
	I hope that the House will be interested in the telephone call I got regarding the Leveson inquiry. I thought, “Fantastic—someone has hacked my phone: I’m in the money.” But instead I was told that my phone number had been found in a journalist’s phone book. Well, for goodness’ sake—so what. I am sure that many journalists have our phone numbers. I was very disappointed to learn that my phone had not been hacked. Frankly, I cannot think that some of the politicians whose phones were hacked would have had any conversation worth listening to. I am interested in colleagues’ phone calls only if they happen to concern me. There is an obsession with hacking at the moment. The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) just came and apologised about something to do with the Leveson inquiry, but none of our constituents are raising these matters on the doorstep. Honestly, the amount that this inquiry is going to cost us—millions of pounds—is crazy.
	Similarly, no one on the doorstep is mentioning House of Lords reform. I go back to the point that what people were concerned about in 1992 was the fact that they did not trust the noble Lord Kinnock and the Labour party to run the country because of their economic policies.

John Cryer: On economic competence, I hope that the hon. Gentleman had a good celebration in 1992 but does he remember that a few months later we had Black Wednesday when £20 billion was spent on propping up the currency and interest rates rose twice in a day, ending up at 15%? Does he recall that with the same fondness?

David Amess: I remember that only too well because I happened to be in Japan with the now Foreign Secretary who was then the parliamentary private secretary to the Chancellor, whereas I was the PPS to Michael Portillo, and we got called back. The hon. Gentleman wants to lead me down a track to do with Europe and shadowing the Deutschmark, but I shall not succumb to that.
	I congratulate the Government on the banking reform Bill. Shortly after the election, the Chancellor announced the creation of the Independent Commission on Banking, which was asked to consider structural and related non-structural reforms to the UK banking sector to promote financial stability and competition. Any reforms should be implemented by 2019. No doubt there will be lots of discussion about this legislation, which I hope will at long last bring about fundamental reform of the banking system. It will include the ring-fencing of retail banking and measures on capital adequacy requirements. There will be radical reforms in the Bill which are needed entirely because the Labour Government and the previous Prime Minister completely destroyed the banking sector through what went on with the Financial Services Authority. They should be absolutely—[ Interruption. ] Some Labour Members, although not all, have a very short memory about what happened at that time. The financial crisis originated in the financial sector and so I believe that regulation is very important. London is the capital of the financial world and we need to lead the globe in these reforms.

David Amess: I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman. Some of the banks have forgotten everything that happened. They are not lending particularly to small businesses and I agree with him that they should act now rather than waiting until the Bill becomes an Act.
	The right hon. Member for—it is a Welsh constituency —[Hon. Members: “Dwyfor Meirionnydd.”] Well, it is in Wales. I am glad that the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) mentioned the draft Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill. In 2008, the Competition Commission conducted an inquiry into the UK grocery market, because of concerns that supermarkets were exploiting their supply chains. The right hon. Gentleman was spot-on with the points he raised. The draft Bill was published last year and will establish an adjudicator. The right hon. Gentleman expressed some concerns about the powers, and another Member—I think it was the hon. Member for Luton South (Gavin Shuker)—asked whether they should be in the Bill. It is good that an adjudicator will be appointed, with the power to investigate a grocery firm with revenue in excess of £1 billion if it is suspected of breaching the code relating to its suppliers.
	It is vital that we do everything we can to help small businesses in these troubling times of austerity. That certainly includes grocery suppliers that are often family-run local businesses. There is no doubt that the major supermarkets have a monopoly in the United Kingdom grocery market, so I welcome any steps to prevent them from using their powers to leave their suppliers out of pocket.

David Amess: I believe that the Bill will achieve that end and that it will be effective. I know how tough things have been for farmers, particularly in Northern Ireland.
	It is important to have a balanced grocery market, where suppliers get a fair deal. There will be further benefits for consumers, because they will be able to buy the best of British produce, which will make the market more sustainable.
	The hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), among others, mentioned adoption and family matters. Pro-life Members will have been sad to hear that Phyllis Bowman died at the weekend. With the late Lord Braine, she did iconic work on pro-life matters and I pay tribute to her.
	I was delighted to see that there will be a Bill on adoption and family matters. Some years ago, my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier) introduced
	a measure on adoption, but we badly need updated legislation. It will remove the absurd barriers that make the adoption process difficult. A new six-month limit on care proceedings will be introduced in England and Wales, and the law will be changed to ensure that more children have a relationship with their father after family break-up. All Members get letters from constituents about that difficult issue.
	I welcome the provision for mothers and fathers to swap their parental leave allowance after the birth of a child. The Leader of the Opposition said that the Opposition would support the measures. The Prime Minister is right to be passionate about giving children a good start in life.
	I welcome the measures to deal with the royal succession that were announced by Her Majesty in the Gracious Speech. Very much in the future, when there is a change of monarch we shall have King Charles, but if Princess Anne had been the oldest child she would not have succeeded. Anyone who knows Princess Anne applauds her hard work; she does a wonderful job. I am delighted that there will be a change to the law on royal succession. As a Catholic, I suppose I am biased, but I am also delighted that Catholics will finally be allowed to marry into the royal family.
	I am already sick to death of hearing about Lords reform, even before we spend 18 months going on about it. If anyone wants to know what is wrong with the House of Lords, it is the Labour party, which completely messed up the House of Lords without a plan for dealing with it. I do not address my remarks to Labour Members elected in recent years, but it was a bit rich to listen to speech after speech from Labour Members who condemned the House of Lords and everything it stood for, when the next minute they accepted a peerage. There is no consistency.
	When the Labour Government took office in 1997, they thought for narrow class reasons that they would get rid of the House of Lords—all those hereditaries, all terribly posh—but there was no actual plan for reform. As a Conservative Member of Parliament, I am totally against the Americanisation of our system, so I am opposed to a wholly elected second Chamber, which would definitely be in competition with this place. I agree with the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch who asked how it could be fair to have Members elected for 15 years. It certainly is not fair. I hope that we shall not waste hours and hours of precious time arguing about House of Lords reform. I know that the Liberals are keen on it—

David Amess: I suppose the get-out clause is that we did not have a solely Conservative Government, but a coalition, so there was a compromise. I certainly was never in favour of reform. In the other place, there are women and men of wonderful experience, who bring great
	value as a revising Chamber. I am totally opposed to having the second Chamber in competition with this place.

David Amess: I agree with my hon. Friend that there are now so many peers that apparently they cannot all even find a place for prayers. It is crazy. There are too many Members in the House of Lords—nearly 1,000. It is a complete mess and I do not want this Chamber to waste hours and hours talking about something on which we will never agree. It is certainly not No. 1 in the list of priorities of the British people.
	I welcome the proposal for a national crime agency. My right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) is an expert in such matters and I shall not compete with him; I will speak in more simplistic terms. Phasing out the National Policing Improvement Agency is a good thing. Creating a new national crime agency will help further to tackle serious crime in the UK. As we have seen over the past year, our border forces and urban police forces can be overwhelmed, so the establishment of the agency will help to ease the burdens and protect us against one of the most serious threats facing this country—organised crime. It costs the United Kingdom between £20 million and £40 million in social and economic terms, and affects the most vulnerable people in society. Only yesterday, we heard the judgment in the terrible case of girls who had been groomed. I hope that the Bill can deal with that sort of issue and tackle it head-on. I hope the whole House will come together to support such welcome measures.
	On the defamation Bill, I do not know how honourable colleagues feel, but I am certainly libelled morning, noon and night but do not have the money to defend myself. A range of concerns has been raised about the detrimental effects that the current law on libel is having on freedom of expression, particularly in academic and scientific debate, the work of non-governmental organisations and investigative journalism, and about the extent to which this jurisdiction has become a magnet for libel claimants. I do not want to upset my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr Cox), who is a Queen’s counsel, but the law has become so expensive in this country that I do not know how ordinary women and men can possibly defend themselves.
	Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of our constitution, but it does not mean that people should be able to ride roughshod over the reputations of others. When someone writes to the newspapers these days, the letter is published on the internet and in no time at all there are very insulting comments posted on the website, particularly if the letter is about a politician, and we do not seem to have any legislation to deal with that. Therefore, our defamation laws must strike the right balance between protecting freedom of speech and protecting people’s
	reputations, and that includes those of Members of Parliament. I know that we are No. 1 on some people’s hate list, but the overwhelming majority of Members of Parliament are here for the right reason and do a jolly good job, and I am getting a little fed up with our being continually insulted and considered fair game, which I think is very wrong indeed. I want slander on the internet to be prevented. Her Majesty said that legislation would be laid before us. I know that we already have 14 Bills and four further measures, but I hope that there will be time to introduce legislation to deal with slander on the internet relating to comments on media articles. I think that there should be much tighter controls and more severe punishments.
	There is no point in any of us being Members of Parliament unless we have some real power, and over recent years our heads have been down and we have lost so much of our power, so we need to reassert it. I hope that the Government will consider introducing a measure to enable far greater scrutiny of public bodies. I will give the House one example. I have been on a mission in relation to Essex police—two Essex colleagues on the Government Benches are present—because I knew from the outset that the chief constable of Essex was chosen from a shortlist of one, which is absolutely outrageous. It has happened and nothing has been done about it; we just accepted it because we are more concerned about hacking and reform of the House of Lords. How could the Essex police authority allow the chief constable to be chosen from a shortlist of just one? That is unacceptable.

John Cryer: My own view is that, no, the euro is not sustainable, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, rather than helping to sustain what is effectively a broken system, should encourage countries such as Greece and Spain to find a way out and a way of exerting power over their own economies, because that is how the eurozone more disparately is going to move forward.
	I remember listening to an interview with a European Commissioner on the “Today” programme a few months ago, just as Greece was being plunged into the crisis that it is still in. The questioner said that there was increasing unemployment and poverty in Greece—even then, there were reports of malnutrition among Greek children—and asked whether it was fair that the people involved should pay the price for saving the euro. The Commissioner said, “Well, life’s not fair.” That is extraordinary. She expanded on the comment, because she realised that she had made a mistake and let the cat
	out of the bag, but her initial comment was that life was not fair—in other words, that ordinary people had to pay the price for mistakes made by the wealthy and powerful.
	Sadly, our Government are pursuing a slightly less frenetic version of the “Eurosadist” economic policy practised in Greece, Spain, Portugal and one or two other countries. Yet what we are seeing everywhere across Europe is a rebellion against that austerity. The latest example, obviously, is France, where Hollande has specifically rejected the austerity programme. In Greece, the party that came from nowhere to second in the poll has specifically rejected the programme and is now in the process of trying to form a Government.
	What people told me continually on the doorsteps during the recent campaign was that those who caused the crisis and who made the decisions years ago—the bankers, the wealthy and the powerful—are getting away with it and that those paying the price are the most vulnerable and least able to pay during this crisis.
	Increasingly, I see home repossessions, economic insecurity and less confidence in spending money because of that economic insecurity. Just to make the situation that bit more insecure, the Government now propose to attack rights at work, make it easier to sack people and reduce health and safety inspections at work. That will make people even less confident, because they will be worrying about losing their jobs. It will be easier to sack people and there will be fewer health and safety controls, particularly in the construction industry and other dangerous industries. The result will be an increasing turn in the downward spiral, further into recession—and perhaps, over the next couple of years, even into depression.
	What really worries me, although not so much in respect of this country, is that in many countries across western Europe—particularly Greece, Spain and Portugal —we are starting to see the beginnings of the rise of the far right. Take Golden Dawn in Greece, for example. If we think that the British National party and the English Defence League are a dangerous bunch of fascists, we should see what Golden Dawn are like—they are 10 times worse. For the first time ever, Golden Dawn has representation in the Greek Parliament. That is a direct result of the appalling austerity measures unleashed on the Greek people. Unless there is a change of direction in the eurozone and this country, my fear is that right across Europe we will see the rise of the far right.

Andrew Percy: It is a delight to be called to speak in this debate on the Gracious Speech. I want to dwell on one or two of its themes that are of great interest to my constituents and on one that is of absolutely no interest to them. Before I do, I should reflect a little on what has been achieved by the Government and where there is still room for improvement.
	Like most Members, I came to the House to do good—not as a do-gooder, but to do good for my constituents. I came here as a Conservative in the belief that I would be able to rebalance how hard-working folk in Brigg and Goole, and beyond, are treated. In some respects, the Government have made progress; some of the changes to the benefit system have made work pay,
	and I support those wholeheartedly, as do my constituents. When they speak to me in the street or I knock on their doors, they generally say that they support the benefit cap and changes to entitlement programmes. Similarly, I am delighted that the Government have been able to freeze council tax, which doubled under the previous Government, for the past two years.
	However, there have also been things that I have not felt comfortable with and which I do not think have in any way rebalanced fairness or rewarded those who try hard and want to do the best for themselves and their families. That is why I have voted against a number of measures, although I have voted with the Government on the vast majority of occasions—about 90% of the time. In any other job, I would be a slavish loyalist out for promotion, but in this place if a Government Member votes a couple of per cent. of the time against the Government, they are a serial rebel.
	On issues such as the bedroom tax and changes to council house tenancies, I think that the Government got it wrong. Similarly, I do not yet think that the Government have rebalanced things as they should have in favour of hard-working citizens on issues such as immigration and law and order. Some of that, of course, is because we find ourselves in a coalition Government.
	The other day, I was asked on Radio Humberside, which I am sure many hon. Members listen to, whether it was right for my colleagues to say that the Government were not Conservative enough. I said that that was right. It is a simple fact. Just as the Government are not Lib Dem enough for Lib Dems, they are not Conservative enough for Conservatives.
	I say to Conservative Front Benchers that many of the pitfalls and traps into which we seem to have walked in the past few months—indeed, the past couple of years—have been those that our coalition colleagues have advised us to advance towards. Perhaps the message should be that sometimes we should stick with our gut. I hope that, in so far as anybody in this place listens to speeches from Back Benchers, that message will be taken back to the powers that be in Whitehall and elsewhere.
	I welcome much in the Gracious Speech. I mentioned the themes of particular interest to my constituents. I welcome the draft social care Bill. Social care is the biggest challenge facing our country and, like many Members who have spoken, I hope that we will be able to advance on it on a cross-party basis. In my view, there is one opportunity to get the issue right. There are huge pressures, not only on the NHS but on local authorities, and they will only increase. I say to Front Benchers that we must advance in a way that protects those who have tried to make provision for themselves and have worked hard.
	Many in my constituency have worked hard, got a private pension and tried incredibly hard during their working lives but now face the prospect of having to sell their homes to pay for care. That absolutely has to be taken into account. Labour Front Benchers have made it clear that the matter should not be kicked into the long grass, and they are right—although I question whether they made any progress on the issue when they were in power. We must not rush, either, because we must get it right.
	I look forward to the reforms on special educational needs and support for disabled people. As I know from my previous employment as a schoolteacher, those issues definitely need to be addressed. We have to improve how the statementing process works and that is why I welcome its replacement with the integrated education, health and care plans. If those simplify the process for families and young people, as I hope a single assessment will, that will be all to the better. I also say to Ministers, whom I am sure are listening, that we must ensure that those plans are supported with proper statutory obligations across the various agencies involved, including academies and free schools.
	I look forward to the changes to access rights for divorced fathers, and I hope that they will provide another opportunity for us to push forward the issue of grandparents’ rights, which are supported on both sides of the House.
	What are the most important issues? I have heard a lot from people on my side about what happened in the local elections last week. We did not have any on my patch, but I have heard a great deal about them. People have talked about House of Lords reform and other issues, but such matters are not why the coalition parties did so badly. The people of Brigg and Goole are not worried about House of Lords reform or other matters; they are worried about the economy and job creation, both of which are struggling at the moment.
	As I have watched this debate in my office and in the Chamber, I have been surprised by some of the comments from Labour Members about what they left to this country. I know that they will attempt to gloss over their record, but given the area that I represent—the Humber, east Yorkshire and north Lincolnshire; only two or three Members representing that area were born and bred there—I do not recognise the glory days of the previous Administration. During their time in power, the Humber lost manufacturing jobs and the number of private sector jobs was lower in 2010, when they left office, than it was in 1997. We also faced the prospect of Labour’s dreaded ports tax, which would have killed jobs in our successful ports such as Goole, Immingham and Hull. We also saw no action regarding the Humber bridge, which, since its creation, has divided our sub-regional economy. Now this Government have acted to halve the tolls on the Humber bridge.
	Ministers are absolutely right to tell us that they want to prioritise jobs and economic growth, and I hope that they will continue do so. I have two warnings for them from my region, one of which they will have heard plenty about recently—the prospect of the caravan tax. Some 90% of manufacturing in this industry is located in east Yorkshire, and thousands of jobs are involved. Many of the people working in that industry are already on three-day weeks. The Government’s own projections for the impact of the tax suggest a further 30% reduction in static caravan sales. This is a successful industry, most of which is deployed in the United Kingdom. The supply chain is almost wholly within the UK, and there are thousands of jobs on caravan parks up and down the country. I hope that the Government will listen to what is being said about this, and I think that they are starting to do so.
	I completely support a lot of the changes that have been made in the public sector, including on pensions. I would be happy to defend those to my former colleagues,
	some of whom are probably not too keen to drink with me these days as they see the proposed changes to teachers’ pensions. I defend all those changes, because it is clear that in the past few years the state became too big and the gap between public sector pensions and private sector pensions became too wide. However, the Government need to proceed extremely carefully on regional pay. In the Humber, we have struggled to attract people into teaching. When I was a local councillor in Hull, we had to come up with the so-called Hull offer whereby we had to pay people more to come and teach in local schools. A few weeks ago, when my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers), the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Austin Mitchell), the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) and I were at a meeting with our local hospital trust, we were told that the trust was unable to attract doctors to come and work in our NHS trust area and would possibly have to consider paying more as a consequence.
	Some people in the public sector understandably feel that they are being targeted at the moment. There is undoubtedly an issue with pay in the south-east of England, but it would be morally wrong to take money from public sector workers in the north of England to solve a problem that exists in the south. Taking money out of the public sector in an area such as Yorkshire and northern Lincolnshire, which is very reliant on it, can only have a knock-on effect on the private sector. Ministers need to be very careful as they move forward on this issue. I do not rule the policy out completely, but we need to see more detail. When the previous Government introduced academies, they conceded the principle of allowing schools to set their own pay and conditions, and they introduced that in HM Courts and Tribunals Service.
	House of Lords reform is one issue in the Gracious Speech that is of absolutely no interest to my constituents. I have not been regularly stopped while doing my shopping in Goole and elsewhere by people saying, “But Andrew, what we really want is for you to get on and reform the House of Lords.” As it happens, I think that the Government are right to raise the issue, as I support reform of the House of Lords. When I came here, I was told that it was packed full of talent and the debates were wonderful. Doubtless there are some very good people in there, but there are also people who have absolutely no legitimacy and no right to sit there, and are perhaps not necessarily as in touch with the country as it is today as they should be. However, by reforming something one can make it a lot worse. The Government’s proposals for 15-year non-renewable terms would do nothing to inject democracy into the House of Lords. I would like a 90% to 100% elected Chamber with those elections taking place at the same time as the general election and people serving five-year terms. I say that as a history teacher and somebody who does not like to see traditions swept aside lightly. Indeed, were it not for the House of Lords in these past few months, the Government might not have seen sense on matters such as the chief coroner and, recently, on mesothelioma.
	I understand the important role that the House of Lords plays in our democracy, but the Government’s proposals do not stand up to much scrutiny and would not do much to inject democracy. They should press ahead with having a debate on the issue, but the current proposals would not enjoy my support, especially as
	they involve using a voting system—the single transferable vote—on which the public have had no say. I think that we can safely say after last year’s referendum on the alternative vote that the public have voted against moving to a more proportional system and want to retain first past the post; certainly, that was their choice.
	I look forward to many of the proposals in the Queen’s Speech, which has three policy areas of which I am particularly supportive. I commend the Government for prioritising jobs and the economy. I also commend them for taking the action that we have already seen in the Humber, where in many areas they have done an awful lot of good—although there is a risk that that could be undone by the caravan tax and regional pay. Broadly speaking, I welcome this Gracious Speech and look forward to the forthcoming debates.

Charlie Elphicke: Yes, and no doubt five different views could be advanced.
	We all agree about the key point of the Queen’s Speech and the challenge facing this country. When I talk to my constituents in Dover and Deal and ask, “What is your priority?”, they say, “It’s the economy, stupid”—President Clinton made much of that point in his first election campaign. The economy is the heartland, and it is essential that we have more jobs and money in Britain. We have had a very difficult time for the past four years, and the situation is challenging for many families in my constituency, who are struggling to get by and have not had a pay rise for a very long time. They are struggling to keep hold of a job while we seek to rebuild out of the mess that went before. I therefore particularly welcome the fact that the Government’s first priority is to reduce the deficit and restore economic stability.
	The hon. Member for Swansea West has a prescription along the lines of saying that if we did not cut so far and so fast, all would be fine. The difficulty with that is that we would need to borrow more money. If we did that, we would threaten our economic credibility, which would mean rising interest rates on Government debt. If that happened, interest rates would increase for businesses and home owners.
	We have been lucky because we have same level of deficit as Greece, but the markets trust our economic policy and our cracking down on and reducing the deficit. That means that our interest rates are similar to those in Germany, while we still have a deficit the size of Greece’s, albeit one that is falling.

Charlie Elphicke: The hon. Gentleman supposes that if the previous Government’s economic policies had continued, the markets would have played along, and the music would have kept playing. Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Italy are evidence against that. We are very lucky that we had a change of Government. We had a close shave, but we have managed so far, goodness willing, to escape the position into which we would otherwise have fallen. Without a shadow of a doubt, the previous Government would have taken us the way of Greece and we would have been plunged into serious economic chaos. We would not be talking about a technical double-dip recession, but a minus 5 or minus 6 double-dip recession, of the sort and on the scale that is happening in Greece. I hope that when the Office for National Statistics reviews the figures in a few months, we will see that we skirted recession, but were not in recession. Many of us feel that confidence is already rebuilding. From other surveys, many of us suspect that the ONS figures will be revised upwards, and we will find that we did not go into recession and that we may just be starting to recover.
	I hope that that is the case because our constituents have had and are having a difficult time trying to keep hold of their jobs, get a pay rise and pay their bills, which have been increasing ever faster. The Government’s policies, which focus on the economy like a laser beam, are right. We need a more flexible labour market—not a right-wing, “Let’s have the ability to hire and fire at will” policy. The OECD growth project investigated the matter at length and in detail and concluded that a flexible labour market was a key driver of economic growth. It identified another key driver as lower corporation taxes, which the Government are delivering. It also said that a certain and credible financial services and competition regulation regime, which we are rebuilding, was another key driver.
	I think that the House accepts that the Financial Services Authority system—the tripartite regulation system—was an unmitigated disaster. The brainchild of the former Prime Minister and the shadow Chancellor, when it was put to the test, it was found entirely wanting. The Bank of England managed to save the secondary banking system and our general banking system in the 1970s, but this time, we had to have massive state-funded bail-outs, which cost the taxpayer a fortune. That need not and would not have happened had the FSA and the tripartite regulatory regime not been in place.
	The OECD growth project is also clear that increased competition to promote enterprise and fair markets is also important. Promoting competition, free enterprise, fair markets and a level playing field for market entrants is vital. We have pro-growth policies on all those. I make no bones about the fact that I should like the Government to be more pro-growth to get the economy moving even quicker. I should like them to lever in more private investment sooner so that we can grow more quickly. However, I recognise that all government is a negotiation, and it is clearly a challenge in a coalition to have everything that we would like. From a Conservative point of view, I would like a more pro-growth policy so that we grow the economy even more quickly.
	I am realistic about what we can do, but I think that we are doing a lot, and as much as we can. I can look my constituents in the eye and say that we are trying to get the economy growing as quickly as possible, that we are focused on it and that nothing matters to us more than jobs and money.
	It is real cheek for the Opposition to talk about youth unemployment, for two reasons. First, it rose massively under the previous Government. Although it has increased under this Government, it has done so at a much slower rate than in the previous Parliament. Secondly, when I knock on the doors in Dover and ask people what their key concern is, they reply, “Immigration and I want my kid to have a future.” They are furious that the open borders policy that the previous Government pursued means that their children are finding it harder to get a job.

Charlie Elphicke: I agree with my hon. Friend. That is the central point, which I was about to address. Employers’ difficulty is finding the right person with the skills for the job. It is incumbent on the Government to create a framework whereby people—particularly our young people—can get the skills so that they qualify and are eligible for a job, and that they have the skills that employers need. Instead of dealing with the skills deficit in our population, the previous Government thought it was easier to put sticking plaster on it and have an open borders policy to enable employers to take people with
	the skills that they wanted from anywhere, rather than ensuring that our children and young people had the skills for the labour market and therefore a better future.
	It is important to have stronger border control in the UK. It is also important to skill up our children because the previous Government sold us a pass on the hopes and aspirations of our young people and people who do not have great skills to get a job, promotion, more money and more skills. The Government’s emphasis on apprenticeships is essential. That is what I hear on the doorsteps in Dover. For many in the House and in the metropolitan elite, that is a difficult message, but the opinion polls show that unemployment and immigration are linked, and we should be honest about that. We should be honest with people, and tell them that we understand their concerns and are acting on them. One of the greatest things about the Government is that we have taken such strong action on apprenticeships to ensure that our people have the skills to have a job and do well in life.
	The Government are nothing if they are not about aspiration, but they are also about understanding the pressures of utility bills and the costs of modern life. One really important policy in that respect is the proposed reform of the electricity market to deliver clean, secure and affordable electricity and ensure that prices are fair. The Leader of the Opposition chooses these days to forget that he was Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, and that he planned, with the renewable heat initiative, to load £193 on to the bills of every household in this country. He chooses to forget that, with the electricity renewable energy obligation to which he signed up, he was going to increase our power prices by 20%, and those of businesses by 30%. He goes on about the costs of living and the pressure on households, and yet chooses to forget that the responsibility for much of the increase in the cost of living lies at his door, because when he was Secretary of State, he loaded bills and balanced our carbon commitments on the backs of the poor, which was a disgusting and disgraceful thing to have done.
	We cannot balance our carbon commitments on the backs of the poor, as the Labour Government wanted. We need to ensure that our carbon commitments are executed in the most cost-effective way. That means not that we should back winners or favour this or that technology, but that we should favour technologies that reduce carbon emissions at the most effective and best possible price, regardless of whether we happen to like or dislike them. That is what we owe the least well-off in our communities, and our hard-pressed families and electors.
	From the detailed list of Bills in the Queen’s Speech, I want to pick out the children and families Bill, which contains an acceptance of the important principle I proposed in a ten-minute rule Bill last year: that children have the right to know, and have a relationship with, both their parents following separation. I believe that that is right and in the interests of the child and their welfare, but let me explain why. The Bill does not set out with complete clarity reasons for that provision or for the shared parental leave provision, but they are linked, because families have changed. There is a new norm, and we need to accept modern families.
	Let me set out how families have changed. One can have an “olde worlde” image of the family—a bloke goes to work while the mother bounces the child on her knee or does the washing up at home. That is perhaps how it was in the 1950s, but things have not been like that for a very long time. Just about everyone I know from my generation joint works. I looked at the figures, because many of our policies seem to be aimed at people who live that kind of traditional family life, rather than at families who joint work, which is the reality.
	Some things jump out from the figures on parental employment rates. Back in 1986, half of partnered mothers were in the workplace; today, 71% of them are. Whereas 25 years ago five out of 10 partnered mothers went to work; seven out of 10 now do so. The overwhelming majority of couples with children under the age of 16 both work, which has led to a wider change in respect of juggling the work-life balance.
	It is not just that there are more mothers in the workplace. What about the number of men who work part time? Some people go around saying, “Only women ever look after children,” but that is also old fashioned and archaic. Things have been changing. Notably, the number of all parents in part-time work has changed, which is basically accounted for by the fact that the number of men in part-time work has risen. Official statistics from the Office for National Statistics show that 25 years ago, 696,000 men were in part-time work. That number has risen nearly fourfold to more than 2 million today. To my mind, that indicates that parents are increasingly juggling work and child care, and that there has been something of a seismic shift.
	Many think, “Mothers go back to work when the child is a bit older,” but let us look at the figures. When do people go back to work? Do they wait until the child is about five and going to school, or do they go back before that? Twenty-five years ago, 27% of partnered women went back to work when the youngest child was under three years of age. In other words, two thirds of women stayed at home and brought up the child until they were at least three, and then considered going back to work. That position has reversed. Now, 63% of partnered women go back to work when the youngest child is under three.
	There has been a massive social change, and we need to understand modern families and how they live. If most women are going back to work when the child is pre-school age, there is a lot of juggling and work-life balancing. Who takes the kid to school or nursery? Who collects the kid? Who looks after the child? Who takes primary responsibility in the workplace and in the home? Increasingly, most people whose children are grown up will know from their children’s lives that there is much more of a juggle and a balance of work and life.
	The rate of increase of lone parents has been very great. In 1986, 15% of lone parents went back to work when their child was under three; by 2011, that had doubled to 32%. We can therefore see substantial change in families, which has consequences for family policy. The flexible parental leave provision in the children and families Bill is justified because it is necessary. It is a recognition that families juggle work and child care. It is not just a case of saying, “The mother has a baby, therefore she has maternity leave.” The situation is
	much more complicated, and provision should be balanced so that men and women in a family can balance that equation.
	More work needs to be done on child care, for two reasons. First, the number of child care places has been broadly static for years. In 2001, there were more than 300,000 places with child minders and about 300,000 day nursery places—about 600,000 places in total. The number of places with child minders stayed static, but the number of nursery places—full day care—increased to about 600,000. In 2001, there were 600,000 places in total, but in 2008, there were around 900,000 places. The number has remained static since.
	What does it mean if there are now 900,000 places? Are we catering for all the children in the country who are in need of child care? I did some back-of-the envelope calculations, and it struck me that there is potentially a shortage of child care places. There are about 13 million children in the UK, of whom roughly 3 million are pre-school age. The numbers indicate that 55% of children at pre-school have parents who both work. In other words, about 2 million children need child care, but there are only 900,000 child care places. What is happening to the other million children? Who is looking after them? Is it grandparents or neighbours? There is a kind of child care apartheid. On the one hand, there is a system of nurseries that are so heavily regulated that most people cannot afford them, and on the other hand there is a system of child care for the other half that is completely unregulated. We know nothing about what is going on in that half. The right balance would be to reduce the regulation on our nurseries, increase the number of places and bring the cost of child care down so that more people can access it, because one of the biggest pressures on modern families is affording the cost of child care for pre-school children. It is an absolute nightmare—

Andrew Percy: My hon. Friend questions whether it is grandparents doing the caring and, as I said a few moments ago, they are increasingly involved in families and are the unsung heroes of child care. Does he agree with my hope that additional rights for grandparents will be introduced in the next Session?

Charlie Elphicke: My hon. Friend is a passionate campaigner on behalf of grandparents. When grandparents are constructive, they can make a powerful contribution, but a balance inevitably needs to be struck. Some grandparents like to interfere and meddle, and they can be really annoying. All parents know that some grandparents are not quite the saints that my hon. Friend suggests. Nevertheless, if grandparents play a constructive role in a child’s life, there is a lot to be said for them. My hon. Friend has been a passionate and trenchant campaigner in the cause of constructive grandparents—as opposed to destructive grandparents, whom we could all do without. We all know people who know them—I hope my hon. Friend understands where I am coming from on that point.
	We need more availability of nursery places and deregulation of the system. The figures show that dads are more involved in children’s lives than ever before. Father is no longer sitting behind a newspaper at the
	breakfast table, oblivious to the world: instead, dads are deeply engaged in children’s lives. So when it comes to separation, the question is what is in the interests of the children. What best serves the child’s welfare? I think that it is stability and the continuation of what they have known. So if a parent who has been heavily involved in the child’s life—as they are in the overwhelming majority of families—suddenly disappears off a cliff edge, it makes no sense. That is why the Government are right to enshrine in legislation the principle that children have the right to know and have a relationship with their parents. The way in which modern families live indicates strongly that that is what best serves child welfare.
	I recognise that the judiciary and the legal system are, as always, about 30 years out of date and are astonishingly weak-kneed when it comes to ensuring the rights of children to know both their parents. That is wrong, and we need to send a clear legislative message, not just to anti-dad social workers but to the court system, that society has changed. We in Parliament get that society has changed. We get that we need stability for our children and that child welfare is best served by having minimum disturbance to that which they have been used to. If we send that message, real and positive change could be made.

Gareth Thomas: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke). I enjoyed his speech very much—even the more provocative parts. I suspect that many of our constituents who have children with special needs will empathise with his comments. I confess that I did not understand his reference to grandparents occasionally being annoying, but perhaps that is Conservative party code for something else. I also empathised with his description of many of his constituents not having had a pay rise for years and struggling to keep their jobs. I therefore say gently to him that I do not understand how he can say with a straight face that the Budget was good for those families. Nevertheless, I enjoyed listening to his speech.
	Two years into the coalition, it is striking that the Queen’s Speech has so little to offer to solve the challenges that our country faces. Its measures show that the Prime Minister and the Chancellor did not listen to the anger of Britain’s citizens last week and that they are ignoring the now considerable economic evidence that a new direction is needed. Equally clearly, the confident communities that our constituents want to live in will seem further away than ever, with declining levels of social capital, public services under greater pressure than ever, and the opportunity to have real influence over how key services are run at local level growing ever more distant.
	My constituents tell me that they are now seeing fewer police officers than for a long time. The fact that the Government are announcing legislation to set up the new National Crime Agency when police numbers are dropping, and that the Metropolitan police want to close all the cells at Harrow police station with little notice and even less discussion, suggests that Ministers are out of touch with what is happening at the grass roots to the services that our constituents depend on.
	Given the present Home Secretary’s now notorious description of the Conservative party, it is perhaps appropriate to wonder, in the light of the Queen’s Speech and the Budget, whether the “nasty party” is very much back in evidence. Over the next 12 months, we will see more cuts that will once again hit the most vulnerable and those least able to help themselves. If the measure in the Queen’s Speech goes through, it will become easier to sack the strivers, the hard workers,
	those who speak out, those who blow the whistle on bad practice and those who, for just one period in their lives, are at their most vulnerable through illness, if their face does not fit.
	There has also been a tax cut for millionaires, which hard-working families and pensioners are being made to pay for. To cap it all, the Conservative party is agonising once again about all things foreign. It is again anti-European in tone, and predominantly anti-aid, too. Above all, it is on the economy that the Prime Minister needs to tell the Chancellor to change course. Bank lending continues to fall as businesses continue to struggle. Year on year, net lending to businesses has now fallen in every single month since the coalition came to power. How many times have we heard the Prime Minister promise to get the banks lending? Despite all the hype that Project Merlin and, then, banking reform were the answer, bank lending continues to fall; it was down 3.5% last year alone.
	My right hon. Friends on the Opposition Front Bench have consistently warned that the Government’s austerity plan was self-defeating, and that cutting spending too far and too fast at the same time as putting up taxes such as VAT would backfire. America, and indeed a series of countries in Europe, have taken a far more balanced approach to reducing their deficits, with strong plans to produce jobs and deliver economic growth. Why could the Chancellor and Prime Minister not have listened to and looked at what is happening in those countries? As a result of their mistakes, my constituents are suffering. Their bills are up because Ministers will not really challenge the big energy companies. There is certainly a Bill to introduce electricity market reform, but it will come far too late in this Parliament to make a real difference to the size of the bills my constituents will have to pay.
	In many cases, mortgage rates are rising, while tube fares have never been so expensive. In Harrow town centre in the heart of my constituency, I have never seen as many empty shops as there are now—a daily demonstration of a recession that has been made in Downing street. Harrow council, told by the Mayor of London to plan for a huge increase in housing units over the next decade or so—half in Wealdstone and Harrow-on-the Hill—is seeking to use this open door policy for developers to try to redesign, reinvigorate and redevelop the heart of our borough, despite the recession. It is, however, striking how difficult it is at the moment to persuade developers to put affordable housing at the centre of their plans—for example, on the Kodak site, set to be home to a potential 3,000 housing units. For those in Harrow who want to get on the housing ladder, the prospect of being able to buy their first home in the Harrow community where they grew up seems ever further away.
	The next generation, hammered by the high cost of tuition fees from October this year, will wonder why there is so little to help them in this Queen’s Speech. There is nothing to make the cost of going to university easier—just cuts in the funding that their university is receiving. They face higher living costs while they are at university, and now there is the possibility, as announced in the Budget, of a tax give-away for private universities, many of which are run by hedge funds.
	Equally striking is the recent absence of “big society” language from the rhetoric of the Prime Minister’s speeches. Community groups that were championed when the Conservatives were in opposition are now left very much on the sidelines. Huge cuts in funding that began to hit hard last year will hit even harder this year. Last week, the head of Volunteering England warned that the network of volunteer centres across the country is beginning to fragment, with a number set to close this year. Why, at a time when we need national renewal, are we set to make it harder for people to give something back through volunteering? The National Children’s Bureau has warned that 25% of the charities it contacted that help young people and children believed that they might have to close next year. Charities that were promised Government contracts will now know that they were hollow words when Ministers spoke them.
	The Work programme, run by the Department for Work and Pensions, has seen the private sector winning 90% of the prime contracts. Charities that were told that they would get 35% to 40% of the referrals under the Work programme are seeing at best half that—fewer than under the Future Jobs Fund. More than 100 charities have lost confidence and walked away, yet there is nothing in the Queen’s Speech to seek to address those problems. Indeed, an independent audit published by Civil Exchange and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust at the weekend argued that there is
	“an implicit bias towards the private sector in tendering”
	and that
	“it is particularly hard for small, local voluntary organisations to compete for contracts.”
	I suggest that this is the Serco society, not the big society, so it is hardly surprising that some 70% of charity chief executives did not think that the Government respected or valued their sector.
	Arguably, the most fundamental challenge identified by the audit is how to extend social action to a younger population and across socio-economic groups. The core, it says, of those who provide the majority of volunteering are more likely to be middle-aged, to have higher educational qualifications, to practise their religion actively and to have lived in the same neighbourhood. There is nothing in the Queen’s Speech to suggest that the Government understand how to get more people enrolled in their communities or even the desire to do so.
	Where, indeed, is the co-ops Bill that the Prime Minister once promised? This comes on the back of no serious effort to remutualise Northern Rock over the past 12 months, no serious interest in encouraging more energy co-ops to emerge, no sustained effort to encourage real involvement in the running of football clubs by football fans through football supporters’ co-operatives, and no requirement to promote a diverse market in financial services for the Financial Services Authority or its replacement to help financial mutuals. Sadly, the Queen’s Speech confirms that once again the Government have walked away from the real practical measures that could have helped the co-op and mutual movement to grow.
	One of the Bills that will be before the House during this Session will be a crime and courts Bill, the details of which I shall examine especially carefully. As I made clear earlier, my constituents will be sceptical about the benefits of such a top-down change when they are seeing fewer police officers on the ground. I recently
	organised meetings between constituents who are experiencing challenging antisocial behaviour problems near the Racecourse estate in Northolt, which my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) will know particularly well—

Therese Coffey: My hon. Friend is making a powerful point about people’s need to feel secure, to feel that sentencing is appropriate and to feel that those who should be behind bars are. Does she, like me, want the Government to take steps to ensure that sentences mean that if someone is sentenced to four years, for example, they serve those four years as opposed to perhaps just two?

Chris Skidmore: It is an honour, although a daunting one, to follow that excellent speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel), who speaks with a wealth of expertise as both a parent of young children, a job she juggles very well with her other abilities, and an excellent parliamentarian. She spoke about businesses in Essex, again with a wealth of expertise as the daughter of shopkeepers, and gave a thorough going over of the Queen’s Speech.
	It also feels odd to speak on the first day of a parliamentary Session. It reminds me of when I turned up here in the previous Session hoping to make my
	maiden speech. I wanted to make it as soon as possible so that I could get into the cut and thrust of debate, so I put in and waited to make it on several occasions. I will never forget my first moment in Parliament. I was sitting in the corner of the Chamber and waiting, and new Members on both sides bobbed up and down to say how beautiful their constituencies were—it was funny how that theme kept coming up. I waited from half-past 2, without having a drink of water or going to the toilet, until half-past 10. I sat there for eight hours, so afterwards I went over to the Chairman of Ways and Means and explained that I had hoped to be called that day. “Oh no”, he replied, “You weren’t going to be called at all. You should have come and seen me and I could have told you that you were never going to make it today.” That was the first lesson I learnt here.

Chris Skidmore: The Dilnot issue, which is one of presentation, is that the Government commissioned a report that addressed the specific question, “How do we fund social care as it currently stands?” That is why I want to turn to the issue of modernisation, but we have to remember the important tenet that Dilnot does not cover all forms of social care. It does not cover domiciliary care or living costs, so it is not a panacea, and we as parliamentarians must ensure that we work together and at the same time—Dilnot was very strict on this—come up with a proper system by which we can inform not only elderly people now but the elderly people of tomorrow that they need to begin to save. Only by developing a savings culture and a culture of contribution, which I shall turn to also in my speech, will Dilnot work and will we ensure that the social care system works tomorrow as well as today—although today it is beginning to fail, as I shall explain.
	In modernising social care, we need to recognise that the current system is not working on several levels. Personally, I feel that local authorities are becoming not the best places in which to deliver social care. Last week I published a report on local authorities and their delivery of social care, demonstrating from a series of freedom of information requests to every local authority in the country that local authorities have already written off £400 million of debts owed to them by families—and are still owed more than £1 billion.
	Put simply, we have a system in which local authorities are not only struggling to provide care, but for financial reasons have lowered the bar and reduced their eligibility criteria. They have done so principally because they have to juggle social care with the services on which people really want to focus when they pay their council tax. For instance, people want their bins emptied or potholes filled, and that, for democratically elected local authorities, can take priority over those citizens who are most vulnerable but who, unfortunately for them, form a small minority. So roads and bins take precedence over social care. That should not be the case, but at the same time local authorities are deeply mired in debt because of their services, and we desperately need them to break out of that.
	The current system also does not work because the failure of social care ends up rebounding in only one place: the NHS. We need to make the point strongly that the NHS and social care are two sides of the same coin, and that if there is a crisis in social care there will soon be a crisis in the NHS. Even the IMF has produced figures on the NHS will look by 2050 if we do not manage our ageing population and work out ways of prevention. We must also look not only at how elderly people can be given the life and dignity that they deserve, but at early intervention. If any problems that they may have, such as diabetes or a disability, are dealt with soon enough, it costs the NHS less. The IMF predicts that the NHS will end up costing £230 billion by 2050, and that is completely unaffordable. It means that the NHS will go broke unless we solve the social care crisis now.

Therese Coffey: Does my hon. Friend agree that cross-party consensus on the draft social care Bill is critical? That is why a draft Bill is appropriate. Does he agree also that, as long as somebody is in hospital the NHS pays for them, the draft Bill needs to tackle the key issue whereby local authorities sometimes delay a person’s exit from hospital so that they do not have to pick up the bill in the interim?

Christopher Leslie: May I say what a lucky honour it is to have the first Adjournment debate of the new Session?
	In October 2013, we will see one of the biggest changes to the welfare benefits system since the second world war with the introduction of the new universal credit. The Welfare Reform Act 2012 has gone through, and there was a lot of focus on the fairness and unfairness of various benefit changes, but there was not much focus on the administrative changes involved in the move to universal credit—the changes to the process of applying for benefits and being assessed for them. We should all welcome to some extent the rationalisation of a series of disparate benefits that have grown up over the decade. The administrative components of universal credit will include the tax credit system, housing benefit, income support, income-based jobseeker’s allowance, employment and support allowance and so on.
	Tonight, we are not debating the principle of universal credit, but considering the roll-out of the administration for the new arrangement and, of course, the massive consequences for our constituents. If it goes well—hopefully, it will—they may not notice anything untoward, but there are massive risks if the administrative transition is not handled competently and carefully. That is essentially the purpose of my set of questions for the Under-Secretary in the short time available today. I sent a list of the issues that I broadly wanted to raise to her private office earlier today because some of the questions are technical. I hope that we can get a little more on the record because there has not been that much opportunity to debate those issues so far, and we are talking about a change that will affect a million people in the first six months of the roll-out of universal credit from October 2013.
	One of the most interesting facets of universal credit is the Government’s decision that it should be digital by default: in other words, they are working on the assumption that the vast majority of claimants will access their claims online. I think that the Government’s assessment is that 80% of those claims will be made online. My first question therefore is whether the Under-Secretary can reaffirm that that figure still represents the Government’s assumption. Could she perhaps also give us a logical explanation of how that beautifully neat and round figure of 80% was reached?
	Many people who apply for universal credit are not exactly frequent internet users: 15% of council tenants have no access to the internet; one in six adults generally have never used it—that figure is as high as one in four in Northern Ireland, and one in five in the north-east and in Wales—and 4 million disabled people have never used it. Consumer Focus research shows that 69% of people want the ability to have face-to-face transactions for benefit claims at post offices and so on. I therefore want to get a sense from the Under-Secretary of her contingency plan if the 80% target is missed. How will we move towards such a major shift in the way in which people apply for their benefits? We are considering the livelihoods of many people.
	Universal credit will be a household, not an individual benefit. It will be assessed on a whole household, so a vast amount of supporting documentation will have to be processed when individuals change their entitlements. Again, how can that supporting documentation be assessed online? How will it be assessed centrally, given that we will move away from the localisation of many applications? That online assumption must be tested significantly.
	As a corollary, the next issue is the extent to which the Government commit resources for the minority, whom they accept will struggle with applying online. What resources will be available for face-to-face advice and support for claimants who cannot go down the digital route? I understand that the Department is planning some sort of 0845 hotline numbers, but they are expensive, especially for people with mobile phones. However, I am particularly interested in knowing how much money has been put aside for the face-to-face service.
	A recent survey of the many district councils in England and Wales suggests that they believe that 50% of people coming through their doors and applying, for example, for housing benefit, need to do that face to face. Obviously, that is at odds with the Government assessment of presumably only 20% needing some sort of support other than the online arrangement. Investing so much in the online arrangement is clearly a dangerous ambition. I understand the logic of wanting greater take-up of digital applications, but I am anxious that the target is so high, and I want to get a sense of the scenario planning and the arrangements that the Government have considered if it is simply not deliverable.
	We should cast our minds back to the difficulties with online tax credit arrangements. There was significant fraud, which had to be addressed and meant the arrangements had to be changed. Will the Minister say on the record that she is happy with the anti-fraud measures and the robustness and security of the new online universal credit system? Clearly, it would be a tragedy if so many people were directed to an online system that had to be scaled back at the last minute because individuals found a way of fraudulently fleecing it because it was not secure or robust.
	Will the Minister give an assurance—her noble Friend Lord Freud was unable to do so during the passage of the Welfare Reform Act 2012—that the Government’s intention to move to a monthly payment arrangement will have a degree of flexibility? In theory, it is desirable for everybody to plan their budgets and household expenditure on a monthly basis, to mimic in-work salary arrangements, but the trouble is that it is not the experience to date of many people. Many of my constituents in Nottingham, who have suffered a great deal of deprivation or who are not on significant amounts of money take the parcels of money that come in housing benefit or other benefits and hypothecate them for rent, bills or other things. We are asking a great deal of people, sometimes later on in their lives, to change their habits and take payments at the beginning of the month and ensure that they budget so that their rent is fully paid for the rest of the period and beyond.
	The danger that people will accumulate increasing arrears to pay for the roof over their head worries me significantly, never mind local authorities, which already say that they have concerns about the collection of rent payments. Currently, housing benefit can be paid directly to the landlord, the local authority or the
	housing association, but that is ending, so there is a great deal of anxiety about the continuity of housing entitlement.
	As I have said, 15% of council tenants do not have access to the internet. In fact, 15% have no access to a bank account and a further 15% have only a basic post office account with limited functionality. Therefore, nearly a third of social tenants might not have mainstream banking capabilities available to them, yet we expect them to move in fairly short order to that monthly budgeting arrangement. Hundreds of thousands of people up and down the country, particularly those who do not have bank accounts, are massively mistrustful of the banking system—they are fearful of the overdraft charges that can hit them if they are unable to plan or manage their cash flow over that monthly period.
	It is with those points in mind that I ask the Minister this: is there any flexibility in the roll-out of universal credit to allow weekly or fortnightly payments for those who absolutely need them, or is she absolutely firmly sticking to monthly payments for everybody? That is a crucial question and I would be grateful if the Minister addressed it.
	It would also help if the Minister could give us a better sense of the dates for transition to the central system as we move away from local authority administration. There are currently 380 localised IT systems in local authorities up and down the country, largely to deal with housing benefit. They will be phased out as we move towards a central system, with one IT system at the Department for Work and Pensions and one at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. What resources have been available for the transition for councils that have a residual responsibility for some activities over the period—it will be 2017 before full roll-out?
	We are starting the process of passing over responsibility to the DWP in October 2013, but some councils will process housing benefit until April 2014, and full migration will not happen until 2017. How will councils be able to do this? It will remain a significant burden for local government, and local council tax payers need to know whether Ministers will meet those costs. It is not necessarily as big an issue in my area as Nottingham city council is a unitary metropolitan authority that has several different functions, but for some district councils housing benefit is 25% of their turnover, so it is a somewhat mission-critical activity. They need to know to what extent they will still be in the business of such administration. What really is the commitment of the Government to a local roll-out of universal credit? Will it still be a local service or will they shift in short order to that central arrangement?
	As I read through the documentation, several secondary issues arose. What about pensioners? Many are still reliant on housing benefit, but universal credit is an in-work benefit, so who will be responsible for the administration of housing benefit to pensioners? That is a specific question and I would be grateful for the Minister’s clarification. Obviously, if local authorities are no longer involved in the administration of housing benefit, how will pensioners continue to receive it?
	There will be two vast centralised computer systems, and the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office are already voicing anxieties about these arrangements. The DWP is moving to the
	“Agile” methodology, and
	Computer Weekly
	had a report recently in which it said that a leaked report from the Cabinet Office major projects authority suggested that the
	“Agile methodology remains unproven at this scale”.
	An amber risk rating was attached. Is that the case? What is the Government’s assessment of the risks of the change to this system by the DWP? The HMRC computer system will take a real-time approach to the PAYE process, but again reports suggest that the timescale has slipped beyond the April 2013 target. Can the Minister say whether that is true?
	If we are to contract out much of this activity, will it be sent offshore? Will the work under these new arrangements be done in the UK, or will much of the IT or contact centre work be done in India or other countries? That would be another helpful clarification.
	Another important issue has to be the many thousands of staff who currently work on housing benefit in local authorities up and down the country. Unison and other representatives of the work force have also asked about this. I gather that the Government have decided that TUPE will not apply to those who work in housing benefit administration in local authorities. So there will be a massive redundancy programme in local authorities and no take-up of those staff in the new, centralised arrangements. If that is the case, how will the Government respond to the massive redundancy costs involved? Will the Government compensate local authorities for those costs? Can the Minister say how much that will cost and how many staff will be affected? A lump of money was set aside at the beginning of the spending review period for the transition to universal credit. Have the assumptions behind that sum stayed the same or have they changed?
	As the Minister will know, the Opposition have spotted that she and many of her colleagues are under the shadow of the omnishambles and that the Government’s record on competence has already been questioned. When it comes to universal credit, their reputation for competence is definitely on the line, and it has to be proven that they can fulfil their promises. This is a major risk not only to the Government’s reputation but to all our constituents, especially the most needy.

Maria Miller: I congratulate the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie) on securing this debate. He is fortunate to have secured such an important debate.
	It is fitting that the first Adjournment debate of the Session is on universal credit, because the Gracious Speech today underlined the Government’s commitment to building a fairer, more responsible society, to supporting families to do the right thing, to making work pay and to ending the something-for-nothing culture that gained a foothold in this country for too long under the previous Administration. Universal credit is at the heart of delivering on that commitment.
	Universal credit will deliver a simpler and fairer system, and our reforms will put work, whether full time, part time or for just a few hours a week, at the centre of the welfare system. As such, it will extend a ladder of opportunity to those previously excluded or marginalised from the world of work. The current
	system has an array of 30 different benefits, each with its own rules and criteria and characterised by overlaps, duplication and complication. We all know from our constituency surgeries how bewildering that can be for many individuals.
	Claimants need to submit several claims to different agencies to get the support they need and are required to communicate changes in their personal and financial circumstances time and time again. Universal credit will create a much simpler system, by reducing the number of benefits and agencies people have to work with, smoothing their transition into work and making it easier to understand the available support. From 2013, universal credit will provide a new single system of means-tested support for working-age people, whether in or out of work, and will include housing, children, child care costs and additions for disabled people and carers.
	As I set out, the main purpose is to help people into work. The new system will remove the distinction between in-work support for those working 16 hours a week or more and out-of-work support for those working fewer than 16 hours a week, eliminating some of those problems we have seen in our constituencies and the need to claim a different set of benefits when starting or ending a job, or when changing working hours.
	How a benefit is paid to claimants is important because it will encourage people to manage their budgets in the same way as households. Claimants should be treated as they would if they were experiencing working life. The greater the difference between being out of work and in work, the greater the barrier to returning to work. Universal credit will therefore be administered in one single monthly payment, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned. We will be able to administer the payment on a more frequent basis, where necessary, but we will work closely with the people advising claimants to ensure that the support is there to keep this sort of atypical payment to a minimum. I think he would accept that that is important.
	The greater simplicity of universal credit will result in a substantial increase in the take-up of currently unclaimed benefits, with the greatest impact being on poorer families. As I am sure that Members know, the combined impact of this increased take-up will lift 900,000 individuals out of poverty, including more than 350,000 children and about 550,000 working-age adults.
	The hon. Gentleman did not touch on one child care issue that I would like to bring to the attention of the House. I am sure he will know that child care costs can often be a significant issue for people trying to remain close to the work place. Universal credit will introduce a new way of supporting families. An extra 80,000 extra families will be eligible to receive support for the first time, because people who are working shorter hours will be able to claim child care support.
	The hon. Member for Nottingham East rightly talked about the importance of the digital process—
	Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 9( 3 )).
	Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(James  Duddridge .)